


Subversive, Evocative, Derivative

by TheFisherKitty



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Abandonment, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angry Sweet Pea (Riverdale), Angst, Episode: s05e04 Chapter Eighty: Purgatorio, Episode: s05e05 Chapter Eighty-One: The Homecoming, M/M, Missing Years, Non-Canon Relationship, Not Canon Compliant, Outdoor Sex, Past Relationship(s), Post-Episode: s05e03 Chapter Seventy-Nine: Graduation, Skinny Dipping, Soft Sweet Pea (Riverdale), Spoilers, Sweet Pea & Toni Topaz Friendship, Tattoos, Unrequited, Unsafe Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:14:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29580813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFisherKitty/pseuds/TheFisherKitty
Summary: ***DESCRIPTION IS SPOILER-FREE***(Additional description in Author’s Note)They rode off together into the night, Jughead holding tight to Sweet Pea on the back of his bike, and Sweet Pea didn’t know when he’d ever felt that alive. They’d ended up at the quarry, and they’d stripped to the skin, and the night took a turn into something more than a midnight swim.Sweet Pea felt the burn of a red blush creep across his cheekbones and up around his ears, because he remembered this night. He would remember it as long as he lived.***WORK WILL CONTAIN SEASON 5 SPOILERS/REFERENCES*** (episodes 3, 4, and 5)
Relationships: Jughead Jones/Sweet Pea
Comments: 38
Kudos: 34





	1. He’d wait as long as he had to

**Author's Note:**

> ***WORK CONTAINS SEASON 5 SPOILERS*** (episodes 3, 4, and 5)
> 
> Additional Summary:
> 
> Jughead’s fingers flipped nimbly through the pages, quick and sure as he found what he was looking for. He slid his fingertips lovingly down the page, smiled that little smile again, and began to read.
> 
> He painted a picture of a warm summer night, the quarry flush and deep with rain from prior days and moonlight washing everything in shadow and pale. Two teenage boys stripped at the shore of their makeshift lake and jumped in, unfettered and bare, and Sweet Pea felt the burn of a red blush creep across his cheekbones and up around his ears because he remembered this night. He would remember it as long as he lived.
> 
> (Sweet Pea attends a book reading. He was not prepared for this.)
> 
> Notes: Filling in some gaps for time skipped.
> 
> Sweet Pea’s memories are from the year Jughead came back and no one else did. The rest of the chapter takes place just after Jughead’s novel is published. Therefore both characters are 19 or older in all scenes, though there is brief mention of events being staged earlier in the novel.
> 
> Rated Explicit for sexual content, language, and content to be added later.
> 
> Chapter depicts characters smoking cigarettes.

The high end bookstore in the city was unreasonably posh, clearly upscale in the way this entire part of the city was, catering to the rich and elite. The type of place that insisted on being called a  _ bookseller. _ It was open to the general public like any store, sure, though Sweet Pea figured the unwashed masses were probably discouraged by both the pricing and the attitude of the staff. He certainly saw no reason this much fuss should be made over what was ultimately glued together paper (and yeah, okay, he studied that story about books being burned the same as Jughead did, despite missing the first lecture to go maintain order in the universe by pounding a Ghoulie’s face in, and even he got the point. He wasn’t illiterate or a fascist asshat who couldn’t appreciate the value of a book. He just didn’t see the point of places like this that existed to service an entirely  _ other  _ kind of asshat.)

It was exactly the kind of setting where someone like him would typically be wildly out of place, like a bobcat let loose in an office building. Or a snake that wandered into a bookstore. He had planned to stand at the back, and that’s what he did anyway because most of the limited seats were spoken for by the time he’d managed to park his bike and walk four blocks. And by no means whatsoever was he blending in, his Serpent leathers on full display, hands glinting with chunky metal rings that both held personal significance and were better than nothing if he had to bust up someone’s face  _ without  _ brass knuckles. He knew that between his size and his general air of one not to be fucked with, people usually marked him for an asshole and stayed out of his way. 

Except that wasn’t how it went down, this time. People were looking him up and down…  _ appreciatively. _ A couple of people commented on his  _ cosplay,  _ whatever the fuck that was, and one girl asked to take a picture with him which was… fine, he supposed. But really fucking  _ weird. _

Then some weasel of a man in a bad suit shook his hand and thanked him for his _enthusiasm for the novel,_ _the neck tattoo is a nice touch, looks very real_ and at that point it occurred to Sweet Pea that he very possibly should have read the fucking thing before he came here.

As the crowd settled down, the weasel went to the podium at the front of the audience. He made a lot of noise about introducing his client Forsyth Jones III, a new author in the tradition of S.E. Hinton, whose debut work surely carved a space for him in the literary firmament and would influence future generations for decades to come, or some shit. Sweet Pea had the uncomfortable feeling that Jughead was something like a pet to these people, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who made good and who they could pass around and show off to prove that anyone could do the same with hard work and a good idea. And, should Jughead’s career not live up to those dizzying heights this asshole so enthusiastically described, well, these elitist pricks would probably drop him like a fast food wrapper out a car window on the turnpike, and pretend the whole thing had never been.

Which was not to say that was something Sweet Pea  _ wanted  _ to happen. He didn’t, and the thought of it sat heavy in his guts like a stone, worry seeping into his bloodstream that he couldn’t filter back out if he tried.

The audience was clapping now, pulling Sweet Pea’s attention back to the podium as Jughead appeared and stepped up to it. And okay, it had been a couple years, and Sweet Pea couldn’t help but feel those worries ease a little at the easy smile on that goofy face, the shine in Jughead’s eyes as he lapped up the attention and stepped up to the acclaim he had earned. He looked good, he looked  _ happy, _ and Sweet Pea thought the sight of him shouldn’t hit him in the heart like a punch from a Ghoulie jacked on jingle jangle, but it did, and suddenly he was dry-mouthed and breathless like he was seeing Jughead that first day he’d walked into Southside High all over again.

Jughead was talking, making some kind of opening remarks about his book and whatever part of it he planned to read, when his gaze roved over the back of the audience, snagged on Sweet Pea, and stayed there. Jughead paused in the middle of his sentence, and for a long moment, they stared at each other across the crowd between them. Jughead’s expression softened into something a little more real, something fond, and he looked down to his prepared notes and smiled like he had a secret that was his alone before addressing his audience.

“You know, I had an excerpt picked out for this occasion, but suddenly it doesn’t seem quite right anymore. I have something else in mind that I think is going to be a better fit.”

Jughead’s fingers flipped nimbly through the pages, quick and sure as he found what he was looking for. He slid his fingertips lovingly down the page, smiled that little smile again, and began to read.

He painted a picture of a warm summer night, the quarry flush and deep with rain from prior days and moonlight washing everything in shadow and pale. Two teenage boys stripped at the shore of their makeshift lake and jumped in, unfettered and bare, and Sweet Pea felt the burn of a red blush creep across his cheekbones and up around his ears because he remembered this night. He would remember it as long as he lived.

The real version started a little differently; the scene from the book seemed like younger versions of them than they had been at the time, probably to better fit the whole coming-of-age angle. He thought maybe it was supposed to be the year they were at Southside together. But this night had really started a year after graduation, when everyone was gone off to college, leaving Sweet Pea behind to run the Serpents, and he’d decided to stop for a milkshake at Pop’s.

But what he found there was something else entirely: Jughead Jones, stumbling out the door into the night, biting his lip with that look of frustrated fury like he was about to cry.

“Jones,” he called out, and Jughead looked up at his name.

“Sweet Pea,” he replied. 

Sweet Pea spotted Pop looking out the window and gave him a nod. The older man raised his eyebrows and then smiled unexpectedly in return, and it felt like something had somehow been set right, though Sweet Pea didn’t know what, exactly. Or at all.

They rode off together into the night, Jughead holding tight to Sweet Pea on the back of his bike, and Sweet Pea didn’t know when he’d ever felt that alive. They’d ended up at the quarry, like in Jughead’s book, and they’d stripped to the skin, because who wanted to deal with wet underwear and Toni wasn’t there to think they were being gross. And, like in the passage Jughead read aloud, the night took a turn into something more than a midnight swim.

Jughead’s book read like a coming of age tale with deeply homoerotic themes, at least in the part of the book he was reading aloud, and even though Sweet Pea would bet his jacket that most of the book was devoted to Betty, this part read like it did for a reason. They had kissed there, in the water, under that full moon (he thought it was maybe only a half moon, really, but he wasn’t the storyteller here,) with hands buried in each other’s hair and water lapping at their bare skin as Sweet Pea had licked into Jughead’s mouth, and Jughead had done the same in return. The book had it a little different after that, a little more subtextual, a little more implicit, but the suggestion was there, the essence of the experience and  _ holy shit,  _ Sweet Pea thought; Jughead really  _ was  _ a pretty good writer, because he had really captured the moment without making it a complete kiss and tell. 

Never in Jughead’s storytelling did he ever quite deny the truth of what had happened. It was left ambiguous and vague, feeling and sensation pulling focus from explicit actions, but Jughead had that secret smile again, and now and again would lift his eyes to meet Sweet Pea’s gaze, and Sweet Pea had no idea what emotion was showing on his face but it seemed that Jughead liked what he saw. Sweet Pea did know two other things, though: that night at the quarry was alive again in his mind as though it had just happened, and getting hard in a bookstore while listening to his former gang leader obliquely describe their fucking for an audience was really fucking weird.

Also kinda hot, in a fucked up way, if Sweet Pea was being honest.

He couldn’t help but get caught up in it, even now. Every remembered sensation became fresh, Jughead’s voice as he read carrying with it the feeling of his tongue sliding around the shell of Sweet Pea’s ear, that tongue in his mouth and how they’d kissed and groped and stroked each other in the water for what seemed like hours but really wasn’t, because neither of them was that patient, and it would have taken a sex god that Sweet Pea definitely wasn’t to last through that anyhow. After that, when they’d stumbled out of the water caught in each other’s arms, Sweet Pea had thrown his jacket on the ground to protect Jughead’s back after fishing out a little packet of lube and a condom he had once stashed there in a hopeful moment. And the way the outdoors had felt so wide open and the summer air clung warm and sticky to his skin as Jughead opened for him and he pushed inside, and how the condom had lived to fight another day while they screwed in the dirt just as bare as they’d been swimming.

And last, the way Jughead had grasped him in his arms and shaken apart under him, pulling Sweet Pea under with him with Sweet Pea’s name gasped out on a shattered breath and how in that moment it felt like they were one for an eternity. The way it came so clearly to his mind made Sweet Pea think he left a part of himself there that he would never get back.

After, when they’d gotten their pants back on to avoid getting dirt where it didn’t belong (Sweet Pea had done his best, in that regard, at least,) they’d held each other under the vastness of the night sky, made small and insignificant by comparison o infinity. Relieved of the burden of feeling like everything they did mattered too much to bear, they were able to talk about things that usually went unsaid. Jughead confided the feelings of abandonment at the hands of his family and his friends, which he had not spoken of for lack of someone who would care (and Sweet Pea hadn’t realized, really, how badly Jughead’s core group had left things, but he saw that their failure to show that night had been another nail in that coffin, and a big one.) Sweet Pea, to his own surprise, had spoken of things he had never talked about because, until then, he had never wanted to tell those things to anyone, like what his family was like before they were gone and he was left on his own. He and Jughead had been two people severed from the world on that night, Jughead forsaken by those he loved, and Sweet Pea stripped of those who would give him a guiding hand, first his family, and Toni when she left for college, and even FP Jones and Jughead himself because life was fucked that way. 

That part was more tangible in the reading, and Sweet Pea had a feeling it played heavily into the core themes of the story, or whatever. He was starting to suspect that this alleged work of fiction was partly a big  _ fuck you _ from Jughead to every last fucker who had ever bailed on him.

Jughead brought the reading, and the book, to a close, the pages thumping together softly. He lifted his head and looked at the crowd, over their heads to meet Sweet Pea’s eyes and back to the audience again. Time seemed to hang in the air for a long moment as the audience stared back at Jughead, some who obviously had not read the book surprised at the content, and some who had read it but were surprised at the specific part he’d chosen to read. Surprised, and elated, if the sudden thunder of applause that rippled through the shop was any indication. Sweet Pea joined, clapping slowly in the way he did when he wasn’t sure he should but needed to anyway. What was he going to do,  _ not  _ applaud an almost-sex-scene that had made him relive their sexual past in a public place? Thankfully, his efforts to calm himself down were mostly working.

And suddenly, Jughead was announcing that in light of the material he’d read, he would be skipping the Q&A portion of the event, and his sketchy little agent was telling the crowd the signing would begin in fifteen minutes and could everyone please line up to the left, plenty of copies available for purchase for those who didn’t bring their own, et cetera. At that point, the thrill of arousal having faded, the weight of it started to hit home, and Sweet Pea suddenly needed air.

He was in a book. 

_ People thought he was dressed as himself in the book. _

A book that was about some deeply personal shit.

He burst out the front entrance along with the part of the audience for whom the reading had been an eternity in which they couldn’t smoke, and he himself had only ever been an occasional smoker as a social thing, but  _ goddamn  _ did he need one now. 

Admittedly, shouting,  _ who’s got a cigarette  _ was neither the smoothest nor least threatening way to go about it, but the tall, scrawny goth girl with blue hair, black lipstick, and more piercings than a pincushion decided to be a real champ and hand him two with a muttered  _ chill out, fanboy.  _ He decided as he lit up with the borrowed Bic with a skull printed on it that he’d let her have that one because he was indeed not the least bit chill. Not in the slightest. 

The other cigarette he tucked behind his ear, not his favorite look, but it would crush in his pocket. He wandered past the crowd, catching muttered comments out of context like  _ subversive  _ and  _ evocative  _ and  _ derivative,  _ whatever any of that shit meant, and he ducked into the alley down the side of the building. Maybe it wasn’t the brightest move to make in the city, but in this neighborhood he was less likely to get stabbed than he was to get arrested for looking wrong, and he needed to get away, just for a minute, before he went to find Jughead, because of course he’d never leave him hanging like that. Even though this whole thing was fucked in multiple senses of the word. He leaned against the wall and took a long drag, and let it out as he looked down at his shaking hands.

He jumped about a mile out of his skin when a side door he hadn’t noticed was there flew open with a bang. And of course, it was Jughead. Who the hell else would it be?

“How did I know I’d find you here?” Jughead said, that easy smile lighting up his face and lancing Sweet Pea right in the guts. Or the heart. Whatever.

“It’s always the last place you look,” he replied, and he knew it didn’t make sense when he said it but he needed to pretend this was casual.

“Well, yeah. Because when you find what you’re looking for, you stop.”

Sweet Pea didn’t know if that was meant to be clever or if it was meant to have layers. With Jughead, it could be hard to tell how much he wanted you to read into what he had to say. Part of Sweet Pea clung to  _ when you find what you’re looking for  _ in a way that could only invite disappointment. 

On the other hand…  _ fuck it. _

“Anyway, I-” Jughead started, cut off with a rush of air from his lungs as Sweet Pea shoved him up against the side of the building. 

They were pressed flush together, the cigarette hanging from Sweet Pea’s fingers held carefully out of the way. Sweet Pea ducked his head, his nose bumping against Jughead’s, and he nuzzled against Jughead’s cheekbone, his breath falling hot on Jughead’s skin, until Jughead tipped his head up and met Sweet Pea in a hungry kiss. Sweet Pea growled against his mouth, melting into a moan when Jughead let him in, slick and sweet and hot, with Jughead shivering against him and giving as good as he got. 

“ _ Fuck,  _ Jones,” he sighed when the kiss broke for air. He’d have gone back in for more, except-

“ _ Jug? _ ” a voice called, distant and tinny. Jughead’s eyes went wide as he glanced down, and for the first time Sweet Pea noticed the phone in his hand.

“Shit,” Jughead hissed. He lifted the phone to his ear. “Hey, Dad.”

_ Fuck,  _ Sweet Pea thought.

“No, I’m still here. Yeah, everything’s fine. It’s okay, I know how much you wanted to be here. Jellybean’s thing was good, though?”

His other hand trailed down Sweet Pea’s arm, finding his fingers and stealing the cigarette from between them.

“Hey, you won’t believe who showed up. Hang on a second.”

He held the phone out to Sweet Pea, bringing the cigarette to his lips and taking a deep pull. Sweet Pea thought it might have gone out by now, but the cherry glowed bright, and it figured, because by Sweet Pea’s reckoning, Jughead’s mouth could put life back into damn near anything. 

He took the phone, and didn’t miss Jughead’s smirk, or the sparkle in his eyes. 

Fine, then.

“Hey, FP,” he said. There was a beat of silence, and then,

“... Sweet Pea?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, how the hell are ya?”

It went like that, a brief back and forth of small talk, during which Jughead stole the other cigarette from behind his ear, and finally FP said,

“You never struck me as a book reading kind of guy.”

And that, that was more loaded of a statement than FP knew, or maybe he did, which was worse, because Sweet Pea had made the effort to come, and it absolutely wasn’t his scene, and he was well aware that FP had almost certainly never seen him with a book in his hands that hadn’t been assigned for a high school English class and maybe not even then. On top of which, Sweet Pea realized that it was a near certainty that FP had read the book, and if he recognized Sweet Pea in Jughead’s writing it was bound to end in disaster.

Jughead was also standing close enough to hear both sides of the conversation, looking slyly eager to hear an answer Sweet Pea wasn’t ready to give. But Sweet Pea was reasonably smart and  _ also  _ an ass, and so had a better option.

“Come on, FP, you know damn well I can read.”

FP laughed. Sweet Pea thought it sounded good on the man, actually being happy for once. 

Jughead, who was in the middle of lighting the new cigarette off of the old one, almost fucking choked. He took the phone back, said his goodbyes by way of the excuse that the signing was about to start, and hung up.

“Jesus Christ, Sweets,” he said, hitting the cigarette again.

Sweet Pea shrugged and gestured to the cigarette. “Since fuckin’ when?” he asked, without heat. Jughead passed it back. 

“College. It’s a good way to pretend to have friends. Now I just poach, sometimes.”

They shared the cigarette, Jughead checking his phone for the time around when they finished.

“I gotta get back,” he said. “I’d invite you in, but you look like you’re about to crawl out of your skin just being here.” 

Sweet Pea shrugged.

“There’s a coffee shop, about a block that way,” Jughead pointed. “Bougie as fuck, and it’s got nothing on Pop’s, but it’s open late. Meet me in, say, an hour and a half? I don’t draw huge crowds so it might not even be that long.”

“Yeah, I- that’s cool,” Sweet Pea said. Then, “Why’s a goddamn coffee shop open at night?”

“City never sleeps,” Jughead said. “Kinda like me, that way. I feel like I fit in here.”

Jughead eyed Sweet Pea consideringly, then leaned in and kissed him, slow and deep, in a way that made Sweet Pea ache inside.

As Jughead went back into the shop, it occurred to Sweet Pea that Jughead really was on another level now, part of another world, lost to him in some way even if Jughead didn’t know it yet.

But he’d be waiting at the coffee shop. 

He’d wait as long as he had to.


	2. It could have stayed that way between them

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ride back to Jughead’s apartment took them away from the artifice and the dazzle of the area of the bookseller and the coffee shop, finding themselves in a neighborhood that was much less rich and much more real and much, much more them, and Sweet Pea had that feeling of being alive again, the one that flushed his skin and quickened his heartbeat and radiated from his guts under where Jughead’s arms were clasped tight around him. By the time they made it to Jughead’s little shoebox apartment, both were ready to tear each other’s clothes off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s crack, followed by a sex scene. Okay is it mostly a sex scene? It’s mostly a sex scene. Take that as you will. I miss life being fun.
> 
> There is now the need for a third chapter because some ideas I had fun with really took over here, last chapter will address things more seriously to wrap up the story so if this is too light and/or naked for you, the last chapter may be more to your liking. When I finish it. What have I done?
> 
> Potential triggers: creeper barista played for humor, nothing goes wrong with that.   
> Unsafe sex again, not advocating this, they’re just that way.
> 
> I know not everyone likes OCs. They exist solely for flavor, this is NOT a “two women appear, they MUST be here to split up two men” trope. I just miss world-building.

“ _ By Whatever Beans Necessary _ ,” Sweet Pea had sighed as he read the illuminated sign. “Sure. Okay.”

The interior was about what he expected, fake-industrial decor: reclaimed wood, exposed brick that was just stuck onto the existing wall, and those vintage style lightbulbs that made trendy coffee shops their natural habitat. Coffee-related kitsch decorated the walls in between shelves of packed coffee and coffee accessories, mostly overpriced mugs that said things like  _ bean there, done that,  _ and  _ I believe in brew. _ A painted wooden sign on the wall proclaimed,  _ Don’t be depresso, have an espresso!  _ Cringe. The next shelf - at eye height for him, so a little out of the way for most people - housed the weird shit, the lefty-only dribble mugs sandwiched between mugs with cats ( _ Catpuccino, Meowcchiato, Kittea,  _ they read) and a row of mugs that showed what looked like two cartoon coffee beans screwing above the slogan  _ You keep me up all night. _

“Oh, that’s not right,” he muttered, snickering anyway because a dirty joke was a dirty joke.

At the counter stood a perky (great, now  _ he  _ was doing it) girl with thick blonde locks, cut through with a wide swath of light pink, blue-purple, and green, that mermaid hair shit that Toni made him help her try once. The girl was grinning a little unsettlingly. Her t-shirt read  _ Espress Yo-Self. _ In front of the register stood a chalkboard in a thick gold-painted frame that read:  _ Hi, I’m _____! Everything I Brew, I Brew It For YOU!  _ The blank space had been written in with three different colors of chalk held together, making it somewhat illegible, but he thought it was a weird spelling of Kelsey.

“Kelpsea,” she corrected him, and she said it like  _ KELP-seeeea, _ a sharp chirp downshifting into a drawn out note. “You mocha me crazy.”

“... What,” he said.

“Our special? The  _ You Mocha Me Crazy. _ It’s a mocha with an eleven spice blend. Do all of those spices belong in a mocha? I dunno, man. And our dark roast tonight is  _ The Bold and the Brewtiful. _ It’s both bold and brewtiful.”

Her rapid-fire delivery made her vibrate a little. No doubt about it, this lady was high on her own supply. She leaned forward a little over the counter.

“How can I make your night brewtiful?”

“Nope,” Sweet Pea said before he had time to filter.

“What?”

“Mocha,” he replied, pretending he’d repeated it. “ _ Not _ the crazy one.”

“How about the  _ Go Ahead, Mocha My Day _ ? Is it six shots, or only five? Hahaha it’s six, we pull two at a time.” She laughed shrilly at her own apparently hilarious factual statement, and Sweet Pea thought,  _ I’m in danger. _

She had a weird vibe. For whatever reason, it reminded him of the handful of times he’d encountered someone from Greendale, and those people were always at least a little off if not a lot. He agreed to whatever she had just suggested, gave his name, and paid, then backed away slowly.

The drink she brought him was gigantic, iced, apparently, which was fine, and came in the biggest disposable cup he’d ever seen - “We don’t have any reusable cups  _ big enough  _ for it,” Kelpsea had giggled, her eyes raking him up and down, “But next to you, it looks like the size is  _ just right. _ ”

She’d misspelled his name in the worst way possible. And when he turned the cup around, he found a phone number. He didn’t know which was worse.

He didn’t want to have to reorder, and he thought he remembered something about six shots - or was it five? And in either case he wasn’t looking to have a heart attack, because he didn’t think Kelpsea could be trusted with his body, so he drank slowly, making it last. People came and went as time slipped by, some of them from the audience at the book reading. Kelpsea fiddled with the house sound system at some point, and the soft sounds of a strangely plaintive hipster-stylized sea shanty filled the space. Coffee shops and city people, Sweet Pea reflected, were freakin’  _ weird. _

A hand fell on his shoulder, ash-pale and just fleshy enough to be ethereal as opposed to skeletal. He looked up into the black-ringed eyes of the blue-haired goth girl from earlier. Her sharp gaze slid toward the counter and back to his. Kelpsea was watching them angrily.

“You’re in danger, fanboy,” she said. “She’s a siren, not a mermaid. I mean, not really, but she’ll definitely wreck your ship if she has the chance.”

“I’m waiting for someone,” he replied. “I kinda can’t leave.”

“I’ll wait with you,” she nodded. Sitting down opposite him and setting down a steaming cup of odd-smelling tea, she looked at his cup and wrinkled her nose. 

“Tell me that’s not what’s in there.”

Sweet Pea’s face flushed pink. “She spelled it wrong. It’s like the flower.”

“Hmm,” she replied noncommittally.

“You got a name?”

She stared at him for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Larkspur. Larkspur Lane,” she said. “They say if you gaze through the spires of the genus delphinium, you can see the spirits of the dead.”

“Is that really your name?” he asked. He’d seen too much weird shit in his time to knock back at her woo-woo ghost talk.

“No.”

A pause.

“Is your name really Sweet Pea?”

He shrugged.

“It’s good enough for tonight,” she said, pulling Jughead’s book out of a bulky shoulder bag that dripped black lace. “No more talking, now. I’m just here to save a life.”

She opened the book and started reading. As she progressed, she occasionally glanced at him over the top of the book, an assessing look on her face, and Sweet Pea was really starting to wonder what the hell else was in there.

Finally, the bell on the door jingling for the twentieth time, Jughead showed up. He spotted them, smiled warmly at Sweet Pea, and raised a hand in a casual wave, looking Larkspur over curiously as he made his way to the counter. Larkspur flicked her gaze back and forth between them, pursing her lips and raising her eyebrows as she looked down at the book with a speculative expression.

“Interesting,” she murmured. “ _ Not  _ a fanboy, then.”

Jughead approached them, hands tucked in his pockets and shoulders tight, an awkward grin making him look like he wasn’t sure he should interrupt.

Larkspur snapped the book shut.

“My work here is done. Nice book, by the way, very… horny.” Her gaze slid from Jughead to Sweet Pea. “You should get some help with that.”

She stood, paused, and turned back to Sweet Pea. She flipped the book open to the title page, pulling a pen out of her bag.

“Sign it,” she said. 

“Uh… okay?” Sweet Pea took the book and scrawled  _ Sweet Pea  _ and a little blobby flower shape under Jughead’s hastily penned  _ FPJ III _ .

“Yessss,” she hissed, her eyes alight with secret knowledge, and without another word she tucked the book into her bag and swooped out of the restaurant, dumping her teacup in the bus bin on the way out.

Jughead watched her go, head cocked to one side, and sat in the chair she’d just vacated.

“The fan theories about my book are going to explode,” he said, then caught sight of Sweet Pea’s cup. “... That isn’t really what’s in there, is it?”

“No. But the barista is a sea monster, maybe.”

“What?”

As though summoned, Kelpsea chose that moment to appear with Jughead’s drink, which was in a hot to-go cup and smelled bitter. She looked at both of them and said, “Let me know if you boys  _ need a hand. _ ”

“Did she just,” Jughead sputtered after she flounced away and disappeared into a back room. He looked down at his cup. The J looped back on itself, crossing at the bottom to make it an I instead, and what he’d taken at a glance to just be messy writing was, upon closer inspection, a sloppily drawn heart where the ‘ug’ should have been. ‘Head’ was still spelled clearly, though.

“Oh my god,” he said, then spotted the phone number. “Oh my  _ god. _ ”

“She casts a wide net.” Sweet Pea turned his cup, showing the matching number on his.

“How does she still have a job?” Jughead wondered.

“Beats the shit outta me.”

Jughead attacked his drink, a black coffee with two shots of espresso, and Sweet Pea was far enough into his that he felt sloshy. His drink was ridiculous.

“That drink is ridiculous,” Jughead said. “How big is that?”

“I’m gonna guess it’s 44 ounces,” Sweet Pea said. This place seemed to really invest in themes. He wasn’t going to try to finish.

“Hey, boys,” Kelpsea reappeared. “I’m gonna close up in a minute, but you’re welcome to wait around.”

She had changed shirts for going off shift, the new one aqua blue and reading  _ Mer-made for Seamen, _ and Sweet Pea thought,  _ nope, nope, nope. _

“You know how some people come with a warning label printed on?” he said to Jughead as soon as she stepped away.

“Yeah. I couldn’t write this shit if I tried,” Jughead said, his eyes narrowed after her. He shifted to Sweet Pea, really looking at him, and something sparked in his eyes, and he bit his lip.

“You wanna get out of here?”he asked, his voice dipping low, and soft, and suggestive.

Sweet Pea felt a rush that wasn’t from the caffeine, something that shot low, landed hot, and left him lightheaded.  _ Yes,  _ he thought,  _ yes, yes, yes. _

***

The door to the small apartment swung inward and thudded into the wall as the two men stumbled through the doorway. Sweet Pea elbowed the door back toward the frame and kicked it shut the rest of the way at an awkward angle before pressing Jughead up against the wall. He surged forward, pressing their mouths together licking in hard past Jughead’s lips, feeling teeth and tongue and heat, and moaned as Jughead fisted his hair and leaned into the filthy kiss between them.

“Fuck, Sweet Pea, yes,” Jughead whined, shoving Sweet Pea’s jacket off his shoulders as his companion broke away from his mouth to bite at his jaw before kissing down his neck. Sweet Pea shrugged out of the jacket the rest of the way and let it fall to the floor.

They had kissed almost immediately after leaving the coffee shop, and then again a block later, and then about halfway back to Sweet Pea’s bike, Jughead had slid an arm around Sweet Pea’s waist and stuffed his hand in his back pocket and squeezed, so they had to make out against the side of a building again for a little bit, practically obligatory, really.

The ride back to Jughead’s apartment took them away from the artifice and the dazzle of the area of the bookseller and the coffee shop, finding themselves in a neighborhood that was much less rich and much more real and much, much more  _ them,  _ and Sweet Pea had that feeling of being alive again, the one that flushed his skin and quickened his heartbeat and radiated from his guts under where Jughead’s arms were clasped tight around him. By the time they made it to Jughead’s little shoebox apartment, both were ready to tear each other’s clothes off.

So that’s what he did. He caught Jughead’s lips in another kiss and started working open buttons on Jughead’s shirt, but after the first few, he just gripped the fabric and pulled. Buttons popped and scattered from the shirt, a fetching little purple thing, damn shame it had to die.

“You fucker,” Jughead muttered against his mouth.

Sweet Pea gave a soft chuckle at that, though it turned to a moan as Jughead shifted to catch Sweet Pea’s earlobe between his teeth and sucked on it. A pulse of arousal pooled low in his gut, and he pressed the outline of his dick hard against Jughead’s hip and shoved the shirt off Jughead’s shoulders, yanking it down his arms and tossing it aside. Jughead rutted back against him, and moaned  _ more, fuck  _ in his ear while tugging his shirt over his head.

“You’re so fuckin’ impatient,” Sweet Pea sighed happily, nipping the skin of Jughead’s neck and reveling in the way it made Jughead’s whole body jerk against him, a low groan rising from his goddamn beautiful throat as they pressed together, skin on skin. “You want me that bad, huh?”

And, okay. That verged on cliche, like a generic line from a badly scripted porn video, but Sweet Pea couldn’t help it even though he could practically feel Jughead rolling his eyes at him. Who knew he could get so hot and bothered just from being wanted?

“Oh yeah, I’m so desperate for your cock that it made  _ you  _ rip  _ my  _ shirt,” Jughead replied in a dry tone that definitely confirmed the eye-roll, though it was undercut slightly by the way his hips rolled against Sweet Pea’s, the way he tightened his grip on Sweet Pea’s shoulders. “Are you gonna give it to me, or not?”

“You first,” he smirked and ravaged Jughead’s mouth with his tongue again, before kissing his way down Jughead’s chest as he sank to his knees.

Jughead had always been trim, lean but well-muscled in a way that wasn’t immediately noticeable under all the layers of t-shirt and flannel he used to wear, and although his clothes were more upscale now, the rest hadn’t really changed. Except, Sweet Pea saw, he now carried just a little softness around his belly, a result of studying and writing and all the sitting that went with it. Or so Sweet Pea guessed, not that he would know. It was a little bit hot, and Jughead whined softly when he licked up from his waistband to his navel, dipping his tongue in before he stopped to nip just below it with his teeth.

“Oh god, of course you can’t just leave it alone,” Jughead muttered, and Sweet Pea looked up to catch him blushing as he stared back at him. “What, is this like a  _ thing  _ for you?”

“You,” Sweet Pea said as he continued to worry Jughead’s skin with his teeth and soothe it with little kitten licks, “are kind of a thing for me.”

And Jughead  _ tried  _ to growl out his frustration, he really did, but it quickly became lost in soft moans and little gasps as his breath hitched, his arousal ramping up to a whole other level as Sweet Pea kept winding him up while looking up at him like a puppy. Jughead ran his hand through Sweet Pea’s hair, his heart throbbing almost painfully as something settled there when Sweet Pea leaned into his touch. It was overwhelming, the kind of affection Jughead had never known how to handle, so he did what he did best and deflected and liked himself a little less for it, like the chronic self-loathing that already plagued him wasn’t enough.

“This is nice and all, but are you gonna blow me or not?” Even he could hear how little he meant it (well, he meant the part about wanting a blowjob, because who  _ wouldn’t _ ,) and Sweet Pea just laughed against his skin and latched on, sucking a bruise next to his navel.

Jughead nearly doubled over, overloaded with sensation and instinctively trying to pull away even though he really,  _ really  _ didn’t want to, and his cock throbbed hard in his dress slacks as his hands scrabbled for purchase on Sweet Pea’s broad shoulders just to keep himself upright, because  _ holy hell.  _ That was  _ clearly  _ a thing for him; Sweet Pea had him going at a ten and hadn’t so much as touched his dick, and if he wasn’t careful he was going to come in his slacks and shame himself for all time.

Suddenly, thinking about the shame he would feel wasn’t really helping, either, and he really didn’t want to analyze that, like,  _ at all.  _ Not now, and maybe not ever.

Then, Sweet Pea’s hands were working to unfasten his belt and open his fly, pulling the waistband of his boxers out and over his straining erection and Jesus Christ but his dick actually looked  _ desperate, _ and he might have felt embarrassed about that if he’d had more than two available brain cells at the moment to worry about it with.

Those hands, warm and big and calloused, marked here and here with small scars from getting in fights or working on his bike, slid over Jughead’s hips, pushing his pants and underwear down past his ass to fall past his knees. Sweet Pea’s hands returned to cup his buttcheeks and kneaded the flesh as his tongue slid up the underside of Jughead’s cock and made him go weak in the knees. 

“Easy, Jones,” Sweet Pea murmured, nosing into his pubic hair, eyes closed and looking utterly blissed out. His hands slipped up to Jughead’s waist and gripped, fingertips pressing into ribs in his back and forearms framing his hips. “I got you.”

Sweet Pea laved his tongue over Jughead’s cock again, mouthing over the head with wet, open-mouthed kisses, his lips massaging the skin and making Jughead groan from deep inside himself. An added flick of the tongue drew a hissed breath; when Sweet Pea took him in his mouth, sliding down the length of him, Jughead moaned  _ oh fuck, Sweet Pea  _ and  _ god, yes  _ and  _ so fucking good. _

Sweet Pea’s technique was just the right side of sloppy, like he didn’t blow other men very often or at all, relying on what he knew he liked instead, and that made some possessive thing long unfulfilled in Jughead rise up, demanding and needy and carrying him quickly toward the finish. Before long, Sweet Pea had taken Jughead from  _ yes  _ and  _ more  _ to  _ god please  _ and  _ don’t stop  _ to  _ oh, oh, OH  _ and finally  _ fuck, Sweets, I’m- _

He didn’t fully get the warning out before the tension in his gut snapped, pulsing into Sweet Pea’s mouth with a strangled cry as Sweet Pea swallowed him down. When he had nothing left, Sweet Pea pulled off, breathing hard as he pressed his face to Jughead’s thigh. Then he looked up, lips swollen and skin kissed with a light sweat, eyes alight with something warm that struck Jughead right in the heart. He groaned again, shaky and drained, and slumped down into Sweet Pea’s arms.

“Whoa. Okay. Hey,” Sweet Pea said softly, sweeping Jughead’s hair back from his forehead. “You okay?”

“Don’t worry, your bedroom skills aren’t fatal,” Jughead said with a smirk. “Really fucking good, though.”

“We didn’t even make it to the bedroom,” Sweet Pea pointed out with a laugh. “These are living room skills.”

“Yeah, and whose fault was that?” Jughead bit his lip thoughtfully, realizing that while he had come spectacularly, Sweet Pea was still waiting. “We still could, though.”

“Yeah? Where…” Something sparked in Sweet Pea’s eyes as Jughead gestured in the direction of the bedroom doorway. Suddenly, Jughead was hauled to his feet, firm hands holding him steady while he kicked off his shoes and socks and stepped out of his pants. He yelped when Sweet Pea gripped his thighs just under his ass and lifted him off the floor, and he wrapped his legs around Sweet Pea’s hips by pure instinct, his arms going around Sweet Pea’s shoulders. For the first time in his life, a lover carried him to bed. It was so very good, because he still wasn’t sure he had any bones left, and also very hot, so he twined his fingers in Sweet Pea’s hair and pulled him into a kiss that quickly turned hungry and messy as Sweet Pea navigated the apartment with a perilous lack of focus.

Jughead wasn’t sure what he was expecting; being thrown on the bed dramatically, maybe. But Sweet Pea refused to play to a ridiculous caveman archetype, so instead he just got a knee on the bed, leaned forward and took their weight on one arm while he laid Jughead out, and then stayed where he was, hands planted in the mattress, holding himself above Jughead before he dropped back down to kiss him again. They pressed together shoulder to hip, Sweet Pea’s insistent hardness pressing against Jughead’s ass before Sweet Pea shifted lower, mouthing along Jughead’s collarbones.

_ Waiting for me to catch up, _ Jughead realized, and, yeah. He could go again for sure, the way things were going. He could feel himself beginning to get hard again, Sweet Pea warm and heavy and moving on top of him, the dog tag he always wore intermittently bumping Jughead’s chest. He slipped a hand down between them and found the bulge of Sweet Pea’s erection straining inside his jeans, the material drawn too tight to be comfortable. He ran his hand along the length, feeling the shape of it, listening to Sweet Pea’s gasps turn into a moan when he squeezed. Sweet Pea rested on his elbows and threaded his fingers through Jughead’s hair, and kissed him, long and slow this time, searching Jughead out with his tongue and sucking on his bottom lip.

They stared at each other for a beat, and then became a flurry of motion as Sweet Pea grappled with his boots while Jughead began tugging the fly of Sweet Pea’s jeans open after yanking his belt off and throwing it to the floor. Finally, Sweet Pea scrambled off him and stood, desperate to shuck the constricting denim; Jughead took the opportunity to strip his pants off, and when he looked up to the sound of jeans hitting the floor he found Sweet Pea naked before him, hard and wanting.

Sweet Pea straddled Jughead, pressing him back against the bed as he claimed his mouth once more. Jughead thrust his hips up, and for a few moments they rutted against each other and swallowed soft cries of pleasure that each spilled into the other’s mouth until Sweet Pea surfaced with a ragged gasp.

“Jug, do you have condoms and shit?”

“Yeah, in the drawer,” Jughead answered, groping around for the drawer of his nightstand. He pulled the handle at an awkward angle and in a hurry, and the entire drawer fell out and spilled on the floor. “Fuck,” he muttered.

“Jesus. At least I know you’re enthusiastic about us fucking.”

“I won’t be if you don’t shut the fuck up,” Jughead said, his tone teasing, and it was Sweet Pea’s turn to roll his eyes.

Sweet Pea leaned over the side of the bed, picking a bottle of lube and a strip of condoms out of the pile. He set them on the bed and worked the ring off his right middle finger, leaving it on the nightstand. Jughead felt a pulse of arousal, hot and filthy, spark through him. Everything suddenly felt ten times more real, his entire world narrowed to the two of them and the bed they were in.

As he had all those years ago, Jughead opened for Sweet Pea just beautifully, responsive and writhing on Sweet Pea’s long fingers as he gently stretched him loose. When he managed to stroke a fingertip over Jughead’s prostate, Jughead growled a curse, urging Sweet Pea to hurry up already. When he was finally ready, he pulled Sweet Pea close and kissed him; Sweet Pea slicked himself up and gripped his cock, pressing the tip against Jughead’s hole, feeling it spread over him as Jughead cried out and rolled his hips trying to get more of him. He slowly sank himself deep, feeling every inch of Jughead’s insides that stretched to take him. When Jughead tried to coax him into moving, he buried his face in Jughead’s neck, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, legs entwined, and mumbled, “Not yet.”

Understanding, Jughead carded his fingers through Sweet Pea’s hair, Sweet Pea shivering against him and hard as stone inside him, making him so stretched and full. His own cock was pressed firmly between them, and though he would want Sweet Pea to move soon, it all felt so,  _ so  _ very good.

And then Sweet Pea kissed up Jughead’s neck, looked him in the eyes, and  _ moved. _ Slow and firm, he pressed into Jughead each time, watching as his lips parted on a moan or a gasp, or when his eyes fell closed and he threw his head back, and when Sweet Pea thought it might end too soon he slowed down, threaded his hands into Jughead’s hair, and kissed deep into his mouth. Slowly and surely, he took Jughead apart, sweat-slick skin, deep thrusts, and two wildly beating hearts.

“Sweets,” Jughead moaned brokenly, almost akin to a sob, so far gone that he could only hold on and let Sweet Pea get him there. And get him there, he did; a little harder, a little shift in the angle of his hips and Jughead was crying out, sounding like he might even be  _ crying,  _ but he rocked up against Sweet Pea and moaned his name and came, every muscle pulling taut as he rode Sweet Pea’s body from underneath, drawing out his completion.

And that was too much for Sweet Pea, a soul-deep euphoria breaking over him as he buried himself in Jughead and spilled so hard it almost hurt, except for how goddamn good it felt, how right it felt, groaning his release and muffled words against Jughead’s neck as he came down, shit he probably wouldn’t remember saying later but also didn’t regret, and a grunt from an aftershock hit him right then before he could say things he shouldn’t, and as he came back down to earth he thought maybe that was for the best.

He lifted his hips, Jughead grunting at the stimulation as he slid out wetly, softening but still thick, and rolled off to the side.

“You forgot the condom again,” Jughead sighed, his expression relaxed and open. 

“I didn’t mean to,” Sweet Pea said, blushing with embarrassment. He took Jughead’s hand in his, raised it to his mouth, and kissed his knuckles. “I promise I don’t have anything.”

“I don’t either,” Jughead said, looking into Sweet Pea’s dark eyes. “I’d have stopped you if I wanted to.”

He leaned in and kissed Sweet Pea. And kept kissing him. Sweet Pea slid his hand down Jughead’s body from his waist to his thigh and hauled Jughead’s leg over his own hip. Soon they were making out with renewed interest, grinding slowly against each other as they began to grow hard again.

“You got me so messy,” Jughead sighed against Sweet Pea’s lips. “So fucking hot, how hard you came, the way you filled me up.”

Sweet Pea groaned as he stiffened the rest of the way, feeling almost dizzy with the suddenness of it.

“Tell me what you want, baby, anything,” he babbled against Jughead’s lips. “I’ll give you anything.”

“I want you to fuck me again,” he whispered into Sweet Pea’s ear, and Sweet Pea was back inside of him as soon as his back hit the mattress.

***

Sweet Pea thought about that night, and the morning after that brought another round with it, often over the next year or so. He’d thought they were on their way to something that night, correcting an oversight years behind them, but it didn’t quite work out that way. 

Jughead and his book were a success nationwide, within literary circles and with the general public. What had started out as readings and signings in niche regional bookstores became a nationwide tour of select retailers. And there were meetings with his publisher, pitches for his next story, contracts, the works. When Sweet Pea had thought Jughead was on his way to living in a different world, one inaccessible to him, he’d been right.

They’d tried to make it work at first, to keep plans for meeting in the city, but going back to Riverdale was too painful for Jughead, and Sweet Pea had obligations there that he couldn’t leave. It wouldn’t be fair to put it all on Jughead. Maybe it wasn’t fair to put  _ any _ of it on him. Sweet Pea thought about that a lot. If he couldn’t leave a small potatoes life in Riverdale, how could he expect Jughead to step away from a big flashy life in the city with book deals and signings and speaking engagements and whatever else?

Whatever else, because Sweet Pea had only seen a glimpse, and imagining what it was like was like a fish imagining it could fly.

It could have stayed that way between them, if they could have made it work.

They just couldn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and for being patient as this story has grown longer than intended. I am absolutely THRIVING from the beautiful comments I’ve received, so please do comment/leave kudos if you’re enjoying this.
> 
> Also, don’t hate me for the downturn at the end of the chapter. This is going places. I promise. I’m not here to be mean today. =)
> 
> And yeah.... the coffee shop scene is a hot mess of mermaid-or-whatever and coffee puns, most of which I found or adapted from googling the shit out of coffee puns, but the drink Sweet Pea gets is one I thought of and the only thing I don’t love about it is that it isn’t a real beverage I can have. ;_; 
> 
> (Bonus points if you spot the movie reference and the book reference in this chapter!) =D


	3. His smile had a sharper edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He stayed the night, but he barely slept. He laid in the bed and watched Jughead breathe, in and out, over and over, just to reassure himself that it wouldn’t stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS:  
> alcohol use, alcohol abuse, alcoholism  
> vomiting (not graphically described but occurs and is mentioned significantly)  
> accidental self harm/minor accidental injury  
> heated argument between friends 
> 
> It’s really angsty, y’all. Like... if this story has a “serious business” chapter, and it does, this would be it, and it is.
> 
> This chapter weaves in more season five canon elements, some of which are heightened from what actually happens in or is implied by canon. Still set several months before canon events.

Sweet Pea was almost okay. Almost.

He was handling it.

He was fine.

He was learning to live with having a night he’d never forget with a person from his past who was out of his life now, and…

And part of him was always waiting for the day Jughead Jones would find his way back to Riverdale, and the rest of him was trying to ignore the fact that, with every passing day, there was less and less of Riverdale to come back to.

He read about this town, once, where a coal mine caught fire: the town was built on top of coal deposits, and as the coal in the mine burned, the fire spread underground, crawling further and further beneath the town, weakening the very ground the town sat on so that sinkholes formed and smoke slithered up from the cracks to leak into the air. The mine killed the town just like it was a living thing, dwindling away to nothing as more and more people left. The government even paid people to leave, but not everyone did, and the post office stopped delivering there, but some people still stayed. The town no longer existed, legally speaking, but something like five people still lived there anyway. Sweet Pea wondered if it took a town dying for people to realize it had been alive to begin with, and he thought that was probably true, and that these people have had to grieve something they had once never doubted would always be there.

Riverdale wasn’t being slow-roasted over a mine fire that sounded suspiciously like literal hell on earth and something Sweet Pea didn’t like to think about too hard (nor did he like to think about the strange shit he heard about the mines a stone’s throw away in Greendale,) but the town was dying all the same. Sweet Pea wondered, sometimes, if he would know when it was time to pull up stakes, or if he’d become one of those people who didn’t know when to leave, because Riverdale was the only home he’d ever known. It was part of him, and he, part of it, and he knew this because the few times he’d ever been anywhere else he’d been unable to stop feeling unsettled in his own skin, a constant itch he could never scratch.

Or maybe, he stayed in Riverdale because if things got bad enough, Jughead might show up to write about it. He could hope. If that hope killed him slowly, that was his business.

Regardless, Sweet Pea had been unable to run away from Riverdale and live some crazy, trendy, gay lifestyle in the city that was like the kind of shit in magazines that people like the Coopers probably read and people like the Lodges actually lived. It humiliated him to even think about it; not the gay part, because while that came with its own problems, like the fact that he was kinda more into it with men than with women but it was really mostly Jughead that did it for him, it would also still have been fine since he’d have been  _ with  _ Jughead. And, a little bit, he was angry with himself for being such a single-minded kind of guy. He got what he needed and that was fine, and more or less good, but not great, and never would be because it wasn’t with who he wanted it to be. He’d met ‘his person,’ as Toni and Cheryl would have said, and that kind of sappy shit was what he got for all the time spent letting Cheryl hang around, more of that magazine-life shit that he wasn’t and would never be and yet it haunted him still.

And anyway, after Jughead, the ‘getting his’ part of the situation had become somewhat academic. He’d get it if he felt like it.

He didn’t feel like it.

But anyway, yeah. He’d met his person and now he was fucked, but the humiliating part about that was how he couldn’t even picture himself at Jughead’s side if he wanted to, because while Jughead had always been gifted with an ability to move between worlds, Sweet Pea was not, and he knew it. Fitting in at Riverdale High had worked because the Serpents were still a group, and they’d had each other, and because Jughead did so much stupid shit to pave the way for them that Sweet Pea didn’t know how to be grateful for at the time, but that wasn’t the same as this. Where Jughead was now, the life he probably had, well, Sweet Pea was cut from the cloth of the polar opposite, abrasive and crudely woven, and that could never be undone.

He still tried to imagine it sometimes, but when he did, his imaginary self never fit, always failed, and couldn’t stop fucking up, unable to transcend being a stupid, crass asshole with rough edges and a mouth devoid of social graces, and then he’d end up laying awake in the dark with tears growing cold on his face and trying to choke back gross, ugly sobs and pretending he didn’t fucking cry about it even though he was completely alone. It turned out that if a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it, it  _ did  _ make a sound, Sweet Pea could confidently vouch. It just didn’t make a  _ difference. _

Sweet Pea had a system, in high school. Jughead was a man of many words, and big ones, even back then, when he wasn’t quite a man yet. And Sweet Pea, no matter what he told himself in his loneliest moments, wasn’t an idiot then or now; he’d been  _ excited  _ to go to Riverdale High because he’d known the curriculum he’d been getting at Southside was shit, and he wanted better for himself and the other Serpents. He’d held his own, but it was easy to look dumb when the new material he was handed was two grade levels above where he’d just been. He’d worked his ass off, and he got through. And if no one else ever noticed that he cared, or why, that was fine by him, because he knew college wasn’t in the cards for him and he’d rather people not view his lack of a college education as the result of a failed effort. (And here, again, was the kind of thought process that led him to bad places, sometimes, because while it was something he’d never wanted for himself, it was yet another thing widening the gulf between him and Jughead.)

Back to Jughead the Walking Dictionary, though: Sweet Pea might have rolled his eyes and scoffed and not understood what the hell Jughead was talking about a lot of the time, but it didn’t mean he hadn’t wanted to and it didn’t mean he wasn’t capable. So Jughead would talk, he’d roll his eyes, and he’d look shit up later and figure it out. By Sweet Pea’s reckoning, Jughead accounted for a substantial amount of what Sweet Pea learned at Riverdale High.

He learned shit like, for example, what Sisyphean meant, after the guy the Gods cursed to roll a rock up a hill over and over again. He remembered Jughead had gotten kinda fixated on that for a while, like he related because he was so put upon by the never-ending shitstorm brought down on him by his Northside friends, who apparently had never been introduced to a consequence of their actions. Sweet Pea could’ve called the shit in that storm  _ choices,  _ but he had also basically punched Jughead to make him be his friend back in the day, so maybe Jughead had not had as many choices as it had seemed like he did. Maybe Jughead didn’t pick and choose his friends so much as he couldn’t ever let anyone go until they walked away first. Maybe that cycle of wariness, grudging closeness, and finally trust that was inevitably broken was Jughead’s boulder, and he’d rolled it so many times he’d let it drop on Sweet Pea purely out of habit.

Sweet Pea’s boulder was living every day for less and less. Most days were average, some were good, some were bad, and all but the best were at least a little empty, but every day, he got up and did it again. He had his life, and he could be fine, he could  _ find a way to be fine  _ as long as people would let him, and leave it be.

Except he lived in a town where people were pathologically incapable of leaving shit alone. They just couldn’t fucking do it, and his life was less like Sisyphus and more like an episode of Scooby Doo where people kept trying to pull off the mask to see what was under there. And what was under there, what was left of him, wasn’t something he felt like sharing.

There were three things, mainly, that really fucked him over on the whole  _ being okay  _ front, with three different culprits at work behind them, and in the end the fact that he couldn’t be left the hell alone was entirely down to people caring too goddamned much. 

***

For one thing:

Toni and Fangs read the fucking book.

They noticed, of course, that he had come back from that trip to the city changed inside, and not in the sense that he’d let Jughead rail him that morning after, and then had to feel it the whole ride back to Riverdale, and that the whole experience was still prime jerk-off material even if it left him as moody as one of those depressing ads about sad shelter animals afterward. And for the record, he kept that shit to himself. Everything they did, he kept to himself, swallowed it back down when it tried to crawl out of his throat and give itself voice just so he could keep holding onto it a little longer. He remembered how everyone back in high school had seen how gone he had been for Josie McCoy, and everyone had seen how hard she’d dropped him, and it had hurt so bad then but he was grateful for her now. That was a lesson his naive ass had badly needed.

So he didn’t tell Toni and Fangs  _ shit, _ but they’d seen the flyer Pop had put up, the same as him, and they weren’t stupid. They knew where he’d been, though whether it surprised them or not, he didn’t know. They knew him well enough that they could read him, well, like a book, and they knew he’d been over the moon for a while, and then not, and then a super shitty asshole for a few weeks or so, and since then he was mostly cycling through faking happiness and being sort of tepidly dickish, with the occasional bout of measured violence when someone really had it coming.

And he should have seen it coming, because of  _ course  _ they’d think the book was in some way involved, or might offer a clue of some sort, come the fuck  _ on _ , gang, there’s a mystery to solve. He was probably lucky Betty Fucking Cooper herself hadn’t come crawling out of whatever hole she’d fucked off to in order to pick apart every detail of his despair and fucking publish it in the Register. In that way, it was a mercy he only had his own inner circle to contend with, though that mercy was a small one.

Fangs had read it first. That in and of itself was kind of a surprise; Jughead and Toni had been close before college, and Sweet Pea would have assumed she would be all over it. Then again, Toni had shit going on, and thank god for that, because Sweet Pea really hadn’t enjoyed keeping things going without her. He was there to enforce, not to call the shots, and this wasn’t high school where the tall kid who kept everyone safe and kicked the shit out of anyone who stepped on that was the pack leader by default. In any case, Fangs read the book, and he gave it to Toni and then she read it too, and the fallout manifested in a terrible pop psychology book club intervention that would have Sweet Pea scouting the room on the way into every alleged friend hangout for years to come.

The thing was, the book was pretty damning. He’d read it already by the time Fangs and Toni got into it, had been given a signed copy, actually, and he had even liked it, at first, a little. Alright, a lot. He hadn’t ever thought he would matter enough to anyone for them to write about him, even a fictionalized version of himself. Once Jughead fell off the map and Fangs and Toni started picking the thing apart, though, it just made him feel a deep, unrelenting shame that joined the party with all the other shitty feelings that kept him up at night. There was too much of him in it to avoid being recognized (and he hadn’t told them about the time he and Jughead had fucked at the quarry, either, but they sure as hell knew about  _ that  _ now,) yet just little enough that it didn’t hold up against the main relationship that was obviously about Betty. The fact that she and Jughead hadn’t worked out either was small fucking consolation when the only people he considered family in this life were looking at him with that much pity. 

The way Jughead rearranged the timeline of events for his story was strange, too. His ever more dramatic shit with Betty had been a thorn in Sweet Pea’s side long past the point where he’d realized he didn’t have a chance in hell, and then suddenly one night, long after all that was laid to rest, he did. The scene in the book, though, created the weird and not at all true to life effect of not-Sweet Pea sort of cucking not-Betty, and while Sweet Pea wasn’t bitter about her, he had to admit there was a little voice in the dark recesses of his heart that was willing to carry on being shitty and petty about that forever, even though that wasn’t how it had really happened at all. He really wondered what Jughead was trying to say, there. Maybe a dig at Betty; maybe he’d just thought some controversial gay shit would make it sell.

Of course, they weren’t ‘really’ them in the book, but Jughead’s plausible deniability was razor thin. Their names had all been changed, but in a way where they were easily recognizable, the characterization wretchedly obvious. Their fake names had come off as insulting, or as one reviewer put it, ‘campy and pedestrian.’ Sweet Pea had agreed with only a bit of schadenfreude, but all it did was leave him even  _ less  _ able to save face. It left him feeling like a stupid one-time fuck with an even more stupid name, and he wondered if that was how Jughead had seen him all along.

That said, if things had worked out differently, if everything in there about him hadn’t been thrown back in his face, he’d have loved the fucking thing.

(There was one chapter in his copy where the pages were more worn and the binding was a little looser, and if he were to drop it he knew where it would fall open to.)

So the book, they agreed, was bad. They all hated the book.

Fangs and Toni would never know why he  _ really  _ hated the book; it was because he loved it, once, had  _ always  _ loved it, and yes, that was a metaphor.

***

The curtain went up on the second act of the whole shitshow when Toni, unable to leave it the hell alone and for bullshit reasons fathomable only to herself, decided to go see Jughead in the city. Just up and went, because Sweet Pea couldn’t be trusted to manage his own affairs, whether literal affairs or, figuratively, his life in general. And, certainly, because she couldn’t mind her fucking business.

Sweet Pea knew he was being a dick as soon as he thought it. It was because she cared, the same way Fangs had cared when he’d read the book and aired Sweet Pea’s dirty laundry to her, the same way they both cared when Fangs was looking at him with sad dog eyes and Toni kept giving him the same look he’d once see on her face when she’d found a dead baby bird. Those looks were getting a bit hard to take.

He’d even gotten a pitying look from Kevin Keller, but only once, because Kevin was good at social skills and faking it to get along, and he had correctly read the room when Sweet Pea had left the knife he was using to slice limes for Toni buried an inch into the bar top. Ever since then, Kevin could reliably be depended upon to sideline the conversation away from Jughead-related things that made Sweet Pea feel stabby - in the frustrated way, not the murderous one; he wasn’t a monster, after all - and for Sweet Pea that was a very good reason to keep him around.

The knife blade had bit into the heel of his palm that time, a hazard of stabbing with knives not made for the task, and generally no knives were made for stabbing into wood anyway. The lime juice that dripped from the cutting edge didn’t sting as bitterly as tears in the dark did, so he couldn’t bring himself to care.

But now Toni was back from her jaunt out of town, and and he knew damn well where she had gone, because she was trying like hell to avoid him. She kept that shit up for a week, during which she was increasingly distressed and Sweet Pea was increasingly angry, until they had it out one night at the bar after close. Fangs was dead set on intervening, which was completely unnecessary because Sweet Pea would rather fucking die than hurt Toni, for any reason,  _ ever, _ a fact Kevin finally got through Fangs’ skull as he dragged his boyfriend out of the bar. 

Sweet Pea was well on his way to worked up by Fangs’ preamble, though, so for a long moment Toni just stood there getting the back of him while he ran his hands through his hair and tried to calm down. Finally, he broke the silence without turning around.

“Just say it.”

Toni nodded, even though he wasn’t looking, and wrung her palms together before throwing her hands wide. 

“I went and saw Jughead,” she said, matter of fact with an edge of defiance. “There. Now you know.”

“Except I fucking  _ don’t  _ know, do I?” He finally turned to face her. “What the fuck is going on that you’re so afraid to tell me?”

“Look, I knew you’d be pissed that I even went,” she started. “Just like you are right now.”

“Nah. Me biting my lip bloody when you were suddenly gone and I knew goddamn well where you went, that was me, pissed off, about  _ that. _ ” He pointed to himself viciously. “ _ This?  _ This is me  _ fucking pissed as hell  _ that you spent a week fronting me off, because whatever it is you’re not telling me is so bad that you’d have to lie to me if we talked.”

“Sweet Pea-”

“Don’t.  _ Do not  _ say another word to me unless it’s to tell me what the fuck this is.”

“You’ve been spiraling, okay? Yeah, you’re doing it really fucking slow, but there’s a gouge in my bar top and a scar on your hand that says you’re not managing as well as you think you are. You’re as pissy as you used to be back at Southside. Worse, even.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he replied. “That isn’t the reason you went, or you’d have just come after me for it. I know you, Toni.”

“I… Look, I saw how you were when you got back from seeing him before. We all did. For a little bit, it seemed like something really good. And I know Jughead, or at least I used to. I just couldn’t see how he would do this to you if it was as good as it seemed like it was, so I thought maybe something else was going on.”

“Of course he’s got other shit going on. Did you think I couldn’t figure out on my own that he got the life he always wanted and moved on without me? That he, what, found someone else, probably?  _ I get it,  _ and the last thing I needed was for you to go see for yourself.”

“That isn’t what happened at all,” she replied. “I mean… there  _ was  _ someone else, at some point.”

“ _ Fuck, _ ” Sweet Pea spat. “It figures.”

“But she was gone when I got there, like,  _ for real  _ gone.” She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “He’s in a pretty bad way, alright? Not writing, not coping well. Drinking, like, a lot. He was on a bender when I showed up. He’s pretty fucking broken, Sweets.”

“Over some girl leaving him, yeah, I get it,” Sweet Pea said, trying to ignore the sharp pain in his chest from thinking about Jughead being that fucked up. “That’s what you couldn’t tell me, that he’s out of his head about the person he met after me? You think I’m that fucking breakable?”

“It wasn’t her he kept talking about while he was wasted.”

“Who then? Betty?”

“For fuck’s sake, not Betty either.”

“What… oh, Christ, Toni. What are you saying to me right now?” Sweet Pea sagged a little; he felt winded, like some of the air had been sucked out of the room.

“This is why I didn’t want you to find out! How was I supposed to tell you that he’s a complete fucking train wreck who, for whatever reason, couldn’t get his shit together and be with you but won’t shut up about you when he’s drunk? I was afraid you’d try to go see him and I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t want for you to see him like that.”

“Oh, but it’s fine for you to go?”

“I have every right to see him if I want,” she snapped. “You’re not the only one who has history with him.”

“ _ History?  _ One handjob ten years ago isn’t  _ history _ , Toni,” he clapped back.

“I was talking about  _ friendship,  _ you dick!” 

She looked away from him, tears of fury welling in her eyes as her fists clenched. He felt like he should want her to be upset, because in that second before she looked away she had looked guilty, and part of him wanted to chase that down and gnaw at it like a dog with a bone. Was it guilt over going behind his back? Was there something else she wasn’t saying?

And he realized it didn’t matter. He didn’t want it to matter because she was his best friend, who he used to lift up on his already tall shoulders at fourteen so she could dunk a basketball. He’d never be able to let go of that, so he would have to let go of this.

“Fuck. I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry, okay?”

She was still tense and angry when he pulled her into his arms, and so was he; he could feel himself shaking through the shoulders as he came down from it. For just a second, he braced himself, knowing he was opening himself up to have his ass handed to him if she felt like it, and he would deserve it. The next moment, the tension in her body left her suddenly and she wrapped her arms around him, hiding her face in his chest. He curled over her, pressed his nose into her hair, and kissed the top of her head. 

“I just didn’t want him to drag you down with him.”

Sweet Pea nodded, knowing she would feel it, and closed his eyes.

***

The third person who screwed Sweet Pea over, and arguably worst of all, was Sweet Pea himself. Like Toni, and Fangs before her, he found himself stuck on it. He couldn’t let it go, couldn’t keep himself from caring. There was a reason why the three of them were so close, and it was because along with all the ways they were different, there were some ways they were just the same.

He knew it was a bad idea, that no good could come of it, the same as he’d known no good could come of Toni going to see Jughead, either. He didn’t know what he thought he would accomplish. Maybe he thought he could help, that by showing up he would turn things around. Maybe things weren’t as bad as Toni said, or it wasn’t like that all the time. Maybe it was, and he had to see it for himself just like Toni had. He just had to know, one way or another.

He found himself in a hallway that looked a little familiar, though the last time he’d been there, he’d been more concerned with, first, getting into Jughead’s pants, and afterward, kissing him goodbye. Hell, Toni had needed to give him the address; he didn’t know how she had gotten it, and he didn’t ask. He thought maybe Jughead had been writing actual paper letters to Pop, which completely seemed like something he would do, and exactly the kind of thing Toni would think about that Sweet Pea would overlook. It certainly explained why Pop had that flyer for the book reading to begin with.

His knock fell heavy on the door, his heart in his throat because he was uninvited, possibly unwelcome. He had tried calling, but went to voicemail, but he was there already and couldn’t do anything about it now; he couldn’t walk away after what Toni had told him. He had to see it through.

“Fuck off,” a voice called from inside.

Jughead was home, it seemed.

“Open up, Jones,” he called back.

“If this is about the money, I don’t have any.”

“I’m not a debt collector! It’s  _ me. _ ”

“That’s what a debt collector  _ would  _ say,” Jughead’s voice said, drunkenly slurring. “It’s open. My kneecaps are yours for the breaking.”

Sweet Pea tried the door and, just as Jughead had claimed, it was open, which in his part of town had to be a purely shit decision. The apartment that greeted him was changed from the last time; there was more and better furniture, as though Jughead had  _ had _ money at some point, though he claimed not to now, but surrounding that was a nest of empty bottles and takeout containers. The place smelled like the Wyrm after St. Patrick’s Day weekend, the sticky smell of old beer and the more acrid stink of hard liquor and sweat hanging in the air, thick and cloying.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You can kiss your deposit goodbye.”

In the spill of light from a lamp in the corner, Jughead looked up from where he was slumped on the couch, his eyes widening in belated surprise. He wore a dirty bathrobe, an undershirt, and a pair of boxers, the undershirt bearing several stains from food and booze. A bottle of rye whiskey sat open and more than halfway empty between his thighs. The shitty brand told Sweet Pea it was probably contributing significantly to the reek in the apartment, but to be honest, there was a lot going on there.

“Sweet Pea,” he breathed almost reverently, before his face crumpled and he buried it in his hands. “Fuck, you’re probably here to break my legs, too.”

“I might, if you don’t explain all of  _ this, _ ” he gestured around, trying to make a joke of it, but it fell flat. It was hard to joke when Jughead was so clearly driving his life to ruin. “What the fuck happened here, Jones? Toni said you were bad off, but this…”

“Toni? What are you talking about?” Jughead looked completely confused.

Sweet Pea opened his mouth to reply, but the ding of the elevator around the corner of the hallway stopped him. He heard voices saying something about  _ Jones  _ and  _ that way _ just as Jughead scrambled up drunkenly from the couch.

“Shit.  _ Shit!  _ Shut the door!” he whispered hoarsely, then yelped as his legs tangled and he went down in a clatter of trash.

Sweet Pea shut the door and threw the lock as footsteps began stomping in their direction in earnest. He pulled away from the peephole as two men rounded the corner to bang on the door seconds later.

“Forsyth Jones,” one of them yelled. “Open up.”

Sweet Pea pressed up against the wall next to the door and pulled his switchblade from his jacket pocket, just in case, the  _ snick  _ of the blade snapping open hopefully not audible in the hallway. He and Jughead held as still as possible in the minefield of potentially noisy glass bottles that was Jughead’s apartment.

“We know you’re in there,” the man said when he realized no one was going to answer. “You got a week to make good, or you know what’s coming.”

Heavy footsteps retreating down the hallway signaled their departure. Sweet Pea looked out the peephole to be sure. 

“They’re gone,” he said. 

“Clearly not at the leg breaking stage yet.” Jughead struggled to sit up, tipping over a half filled bottle of old beer that splattered messily. “Fuck.”

“What the  _ fuck, _ Jones? Those weren’t debt collectors, those were fucking loan sharks,” Sweet Pea hissed, gripping Jughead by the arm and hauling him upright. “Were you seriously just going to let them in if it hadn’t been me the first time?”

The sudden movement wasn’t the right move, apparently. Jughead’s eyes widened; he batted weakly at Sweet Pea’s hand, doubled over, and puked all over himself. Sweet Pea had bounced his share of drunk assholes and had seen how pale Jughead’s face was getting, and had taken a step back. Jughead’s legs went boneless under him and he crumpled to the floor again.

Sweet Pea stripped out of his jacket and draped it over the desk chair, which at least looked clean. Leaning down, he gripped Jughead under the arms and pulled him up more cautiously, bringing him stumbling along as he found the bathroom from distant memory. They made it just in time, as Jughead brought up more cheap whiskey. Sweet Pea knelt behind him, an arm wrapped around his chest keeping him from falling as he clung to the toilet.

“You done?” Sweet Pea asked when Jughead had stopped retching for more than a brief pause. 

Jughead breathed heavily, his head resting on his arm which was draped across the rim of the toilet bowl. After a long moment, he nodded.

“Come on, you need a shower,” Sweet Pea said, lifting him carefully, adding as he resisted, “No, for real, you smell like a corpse and you’re covered in puke.” 

Jughead leaned on the sink while Sweet Pea stripped himself and then peeled the dirty clothes off of Jughead, leaving them in a pile on the floor. His own things he folded and set aside on a towel shelf. It was obvious that Jughead, or maybe the girl that had dumped him, had cared about his living space once. What the hell had happened?

“Nope,” he said when Jughead gave him a raised eyebrow and a look that  _ might  _ have been hot if Sweet Pea had been drunk too, and if Jughead had also been only half as drunk and didn’t smell like the back half of a farm animal.

He kept the water on the warm side but not hot. Jughead was already wobbling and leaning into him heavily to stay standing, obviously lightheaded, and Sweet Pea didn’t want him to be sick again or pass out. The only upside to the fact that Jughead clearly hadn’t showered lately was the fact that there was somehow a clean towel and a washcloth in the cesspit that his apartment had become. Judging by the pink washcloth and the pink and purple stripe pattern on the towel, Sweet Pea assumed they were left behind by the girl who bailed. He didn’t really blame her, if this had been the way things were going.

It was shockingly intimate, to be with someone in this way. It wasn’t a sexual thing - it hardly could be, with how godawfully filthy everything was, Jughead included - and even if Sweet Pea had been aroused rather than disturbed, Jughead was clearly too drunk to do anything about it anyway. Nothing about any of it would have been right. There were no easy fixes to this situation, only this one thing right in front of him that Sweet Pea could do. He murmured apologies when his fingers caught in Jughead’s messy, tangled hair, working through it with shampoo and conditioner until it wasn’t greasy anymore. The washcloth he lathered and scrubbed, lathered and scrubbed, working his way down. He went to his knees on the hard tile of the shower stall, anchoring Jughead’s hands on his shoulders and taking Jughead’s tiny nod to mean he was able to hold himself up, though he was still unsteady on his feet. They locked eyes with each other, something deep and pained in Jughead’s expression and a look in his eyes that was so haunted that Sweet Pea ached to take away whatever had hurt him, that look on his face etched into Sweet Pea’s memory.

“Please, if you never do anything else for me, don’t throw up right now,” Sweet Pea said, looking up at him. He almost instantly regretted it, both because Jughead paled a little at the mention of vomiting again before giving Sweet Pea another small, shaky nod, and also because he wasn’t able to just sit in that moment with Jughead, without deflecting it with a flippant remark. It was just too much.

He made quick work of washing Jughead’s legs, far too aware of the position he was in, then passed Jughead the washcloth as he stood and held Jughead up while he finished with the delicate bits himself. Drying two people with one towel sucked a bit, too much water and surface area for the towel to really handle effectively, but it was enough that Sweet Pea could dress in his own clothes and steer Jughead through to the bedroom with the towel around his waist.

In the dresser he found the type of clothes usually saved for laundry day: stuff a little too nice to wear regularly, and stuff a little too old for the same. A sad smile crept onto his face when he spotted the shirt, a great big S on it, one of the ones Jughead had worn all the time when they were teenagers. It had been a little big on Jughead’s perpetually underfed frame then; now, it would do about right, since Jughead couldn’t stay teenager-thin forever, even though he still had the patchy inability to fully grow facial hair. 

The bed, he noted with a raised eyebrow, was surprisingly clean, not completely fresh but not utterly dire. He asked Jughead about it.

“I kept passing out on the couch, so I just started sleeping out there,” Jughead muttered, pulling on the underwear and shirt he was handed and sitting on the bed.

Sweet Pea knelt before him, resting his hands on Jughead’s knees.

“How long has it been like this?”

“I dunno. What day is it?” Jughead gave a short, bitter laugh. “Maybe a couple weeks. Isn’t usually this bad. Been drinking too much for a few months, though.”

“You don’t remember Toni coming to see you?”

Jughead shrugged. “I lost a few days, I think. Happens, sometimes.”

“You gonna forget I was here, too?”

Jughead got that pained look again, his hand coming up to cup Sweet Pea’s jaw, his thumb tracing over Sweet Pea’s cheekbone.

“I hope I don’t,” he said, his breath hitching as tears welled up in his eyes. “I don’t know how everything got so fucked up.”

He pulled his hand back and wiped at his eyes, sniffling as he looked away.

“I gotta lie down,” he said, looking at Sweet Pea again. “I can’t make it make sense like this.”

Sweet Pea helped him into bed, pausing when Jughead grabbed his hand.

“Stay? Just stay,” Jughead asked. “Just for tonight.”

Sweet Pea nodded. He turned off the light, laid down facing Jughead, and held his gaze in the faint moonlight filtering through the blinds until Jughead fell asleep. He turned his face into the pillow, shoulders shaking as he cried. Everything had gone so wrong. 

He stayed the night, but he barely slept. He laid in the bed and watched Jughead breathe, in and out, over and over, just to reassure himself that it wouldn’t stop. He was afraid to leave, in case Jughead threw up again, and might not wake up to stop himself from choking. Only when the first light of dawn crept through the blinds did he get up and go to the bathroom, where he stared into the mirror at the dark circles under his eyes, and splashed cold water on his face.

“What am I doing here?” he said, looking himself in the eyes. “I can’t do this.”

He had thought he couldn’t walk away, but walking away was exactly what he had to do.

He wrote a note, left it on the nightstand with a glass of water, and walked out.

Over the next few months, Sweet Pea tried to put Jughead behind him. He smiled more, but his smile had a sharper edge. He laughed more, but his laugh was a little more bitter. He joked more, but his heart wasn’t really in it, because in his heart he knew there was a fourth person who had screwed him over, or just the one, all along.

The morning Sweet Pea left, Jughead Jones woke up to a hangover.

And a note.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** Chapter count has changed ** so this is NOT the end, I wouldn’t do that to you. 
> 
> Not gonna lie, this chapter was... hard. Like I was hesitant to finish it because then I’d have to post it and... ouch. BUT a substantial amount of the last chapter is already written, so the 4 chapter count is final. And this is definitely the low point, you know, where things get sad before they can get better. Please don’t hate me.
> 
> I always knew this would take a heavier turn, but I didn’t realize it would get quite this involved, so if you’re still here with me, THANK YOU for sticking with it! If you’re still enjoying this, or uhhh APPRECIATING it since “enjoying” might be the wrong word for this chapter, please leave kudos/comments to let me know.


	4. Dark eyes filled with unsaid things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It only figured that once Andrews rolled back into town, Jughead wouldn’t be far behind. Sweet Pea should have known, and maybe he was expecting it at least a little. He wasn’t surprised that Jughead wandered in when Toni let herself out, leaving them alone in the bar. He was ready for it, but that didn’t mean he planned to make it easy.
> 
> “You shouldn’t be here, Jones,” Sweet Pea growled. “I ought to deck you for what you did.”
> 
> “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Jughead replied, looking almost like he wished Sweet Pea would, and the whole though could be done with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Triggers:  
> Booze, depression, nothing that hasn’t happened in earlier chapters, probably.  
> Additional content warning: Spoilers for some season 5 content, sex scene, sex between other characters discussed but doesn’t actually happen.

Jughead remembered how it had felt when he’d woken up that morning, creeping toward a hangover but honestly still a little drunk. His mouth had been dry, tasting of vomit, and that was sadly not as unusual an occurrence as it should be. He dreaded heaving himself out of his bed and quite possibly heaving again in the process, but if he didn’t get water it was only going to get worse. Or a beer; he was undecided on that point. He could tell he’d fucked himself up for the day and should probably just get drunk again, borrowing against the time he’d have to come crawling back to reality. He’d been hating life for a while, and being alone made it that much harder to bear, but when he’d woken up something had felt different. Something was a little bit more right, somehow, but he was too foggy to place it, struggling to figure out what that something was.

For just a second, when he’d been in the hazy pre-conscious of waking, before reality asserted itself and brought with it the misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms his life had become, he’d almost thought Sweet Pea was there, an illusory likeness of remembered warmth and lingering scent, like the fragments of a nearly forgotten fever dream. 

He couldn’t remember a time he ever saw Sweet Pea hesitate or doubt himself, quick and sure in his actions, a trait that had made him as deadly on the basketball court at Riverdale High as he had been in the streets of the Southside, a fact which had preoccupied Jughead considerably back then even as he’d pretended the high school sports scene was beneath him. (In some ways, it was. He certainly hadn’t given a shit when Archie and Reggie Mantle had played football, or that Kevin Keller was on the wrestling team.) 

Though he knew, rationally, that Sweet Pea experienced doubts and uncertainties just like anyone, the larger boy had always been decisive and prone to doubling down rather than backing off, and it was the impression of that efficiency of action, carried out by large, strong hands well-suited to his stature, that lingered at the fringes of Jughead’s consciousness. It only figured, Jughead supposed, that he might have dreamed Sweet Pea had been there; he was never far from Jughead’s mind, and it wouldn’t be the first time. He could almost hear the sound of a switchblade popping out, at once oddly specific and something he never thought would make him feel nostalgic, the content of his novel notwithstanding.

He rolled over to get up and waited for the room to stop spinning, only to find a glass of water and painkillers left on his nightstand, the kind of thing he had been too drunk to bother doing for himself in... he didn’t know how long. He clutched at the glass, gulping room temperature water before he thought better enough to slow down and take a breath, not wanting to make himself sick. He breathed heavily, letting the water settle before he scooped up the pills and took them, his brows creasing as he tried to put together who had been there and what had happened. Once again he had a vague impression of someone larger than he was pulling his clothes off and helping him shower, certainly reminiscent of Sweet Pea even though it couldn’t possibly be… could it? It troubled him, because he didn’t bring men home when he drank, only women and then only occasionally. He didn’t bring men home at all, really, because…

Because they weren’t the one he’d let get away. The one, if he was being honest with himself, he’d done nothing to keep, for fear of having something to lose, of not being able to really open himself to the possibility of something deeper and enduring and more, because somehow he’d known that being with Sweet Pea would mean all of those things. And for all the other things Jughead was, he knew that over the past year and then some, he had been a coward, afraid of that which he had never allowed himself to believe he could have.

His gaze fell to the piece of paper that had been tucked under the glass, at first glance mistaken for part of the mess that was his entire apartment. That impression nudged insistently at his mind again, and he felt the myriad clashing realities he was caught between narrowing to more limited, concrete possibilities: someone had definitely been there. Was it Sweet Pea, or someone else, the possibility that his mind could make him believe  _ anyone  _ else could take Sweet Pea’s place looming largest and most terrifying of all? Like Schrödinger’s cat, both alive and dead until the box was opened, a hope he didn’t know how to feel anymore existed in a quantum state, and the note sat waiting, able to lift him up or crush him.

He didn’t want it to have been someone else.

He picked up the note with shaking hands.

***

When Sweet Pea got back to Riverdale, he got well and truly shitfaced. That was fairly rare for him; he drank on the regular, but usually didn’t get completely wasted or even all the way to drunk, both because he was surrounded by sad old barflys leading by example of what  _ not  _ to do with a life, and because for someone his size, it took a considerable investment of liquor and time. The fact that Toni wouldn’t take his money didn’t mean he wanted to drink the Wyrm into the red.

That night was different. It wasn’t even what he wanted to do (he wanted to find a way to fix everything, and he  _ couldn’t, _ ) but Sweet Pea’s life was a story told in shit he didn’t want, trouble he didn’t ask for, and love that wasn’t returned. All the ways to fix the situation that he could think of amounted to nothing, so he did the only thing that was left.

He got absolutely tanked. 

“You were fuckin’  _ right,  _ Tiny. Wasn’t worth it.”

He waved his hand at her conversationally, then stared at it like it had disagreed with him.

“He left me for Red,” he muttered, refocusing on Toni. “And you left me for Other Red.”

“What?”

“You left the Serpents, and he went off with Red and fought a bear,” he slurred, slumping forward on the bar top and picking at the knife mark he’d put in it.

“That was in high school,” Toni sighed. “And I don’t think Jughead had anything to do with the bear.”

“You both left me in high school and you both left me for college,” Sweet Pea insisted, his tone turning maudlin. “I missed you.”

Toni sighed fondly, and a little sadly. She had to admit that, back then, it had been hard to picture Sweet Pea missing anyone. She had been too caught up in Cheryl, and no one really understood what had gone on with Archie Andrews and the bear, or anything else, probably not even Archie himself. But seeing was believing, and she had no trouble believing now that Sweet Pea had missed both her and Jughead fiercely, and it had left him cut adrift.

“This is  _ worse.  _ It’s worse than high school.”

“Okay, Sweet Pea.”

“Jughead Jones is a fuckin’  _ dick, _ ” he added. “He’s cursed by the  _ gods. _ ”

He squinted at her, then started to slide sideways off his barstool, a steadying hand from Fangs pushing him upright again. 

“Sweets, you’re done. Give me your keys,” Toni said firmly. She glanced over to Fangs. “What the hell are we going to do with him? He can’t ride with one of us, he’s too big. If he goes over he’ll drop the bike.”

Sweet Pea fished around his pocket and pulled out a key ring, grinning drunkenly.

“Brought the pickup,” he said, handing the keys over. “Thought this might happen.”

Toni sighed and took the keys, unsure whether to appreciate his foresight in avoiding having an accident, or to be ticked off that he’d intentionally planned on getting wrecked in a figurative sense.

“Are you good to close for me?” she asked Fangs, who nodded. “Alright, I’m getting him home before he passes out.”

The two of them hauled him outside and loaded him into the passenger side of his pickup. 

“You got this?” Fangs asked.

“Yeah, as long as I can get him inside his trailer, it’s all good,” Toni replied. “I don’t really care if he sleeps it off on the floor.”

***

With every hour, more of Jughead’s hangover faded, and as it did, memories of the night before quickly became more clear. He’d been an asshole. Not so much the past night, but the past year. Last night, he was just too fucked up to try to fix it when the moment of truth came. And Sweet Pea had taken care of him, and been everything he needed, and once again he had to ask himself why he wasn’t able to just let himself have something good when it was right in front of him.

It would be easy, seductively easy, to decide to drink it all away. He understood, now, how his old man had lived inside of a bottle for so many years. He wanted to. He didn’t want to. He wanted an easy way out that was really a way out. He would take the hard way if it was still a real solution. Neither option lay before him, the note was clear as crystal about that. When no road offered hope, the road that offered escape started looking better and better. 

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? That had always been the problem, the way his life built up around him, stacking and stacking, until the the apartment, the furniture, the stuff he owned were only window dressing for a prison, built from the commitments, the contracts, the loans, the relationships, all becoming bricks sealed together with mortar made of the words he had written and the words he could not write. He had penned his own fate, walled himself up, waiting each moment for a return of the fledgling success that had flown the nest and left him barren and alone while the walls grew higher and higher, all roads out irrevocably cut off.

Sometimes he thought he’d give anything to be living in that trailer with his dad again, just the two of them, the future still nothing but possibilities before everything had gotten so fucked up. He’d thought he was alone, then, but he hadn’t been. It had been the time in his life that he’d had the most to lose, and he hadn’t even known until it was gone.

He wanted to call Sweet Pea. He ached with it. But that note, a few short lines and signed only with initials, said otherwise. 

_ Jones, _

_ I can’t do this anymore.  _

_ I’m sorry but I can’t. _

_ Unfuck yourself. _

_ I’m done. _

_ — NM _

Jughead felt his heart cave in on itself every time he read it. That Sweet Pea had used those hallmarks of a name he otherwise denied could only mean he’d really meant it. He’d blown all his chances, and Sweet Pea would never be there waiting for him again.

It was entirely Jughead’s fault for making him wait so long while he pretended with growing desperation that this life was ever going to fit him.

A sudden thought hit him, a shadowed movement in the depths of memory, and he scrambled for his nightstand. He pulled too hard, and the drawer came loose, spilling its contents and memories of that night with Sweet Pea all across the floor. He pawed through the mess like an animal, desperate and careless, until a glint of metal caught the light, bending it around a curve, and he snatched the object up.

Tears spilled as he turned the ring in his fingertips, a chunky piece of silver, large and masculine yet with an intricate design, a little fragment of Sweet Pea left behind that long-ago night purely by accident. He closed it in his fist, breath shuddering on a rough sob, and the note lay beside him, damning in its finality.

***

Sweet Pea, in Toni’s opinion, spent too much of the ride back to his place telling her all the different ways he and Jughead were over. 

“We are never, ever,  _ ever  _ getting back together,” he declared as his pickup truck rattled faithfully through the night.

“I am never, ever,  _ ever  _ going to let you live down the fact that you just quoted that song,” Toni replied.

“We were never even really together,” he said. “But I wanted to be, though.”

He assumed he had fallen asleep at some point, since he was woken up with the truck parked at his trailer by Toni shaking his shoulder and calling him a scrub. He slid out and lost his balance, if he’d even had it to begin with, and caught himself on the doorframe as Toni took too much of his weight.

“Okay, let’s get you inside. Oh god, why are you huge?” She hauled him up the steps, opened the door, and pushed him through, one of his arms draped around her shoulders for balance. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. “Okay, bed next.”

“Take me to bed or lose me forever,” he mumbled, then looked down and eyed her with a drunk approximation of shrewdness. “Are we gonna fuck, Topaz?”

“Ew, no,” she replied. “Jesus, you’re trashed.”

“Yep. I am trash. Trashed. I’m both of those things.”

“You’re not trash.”

“Says you.”

“Yeah, says me, so you’d better listen. Bed’s right here, Sweet Pea,” she said, helping him sit down heavily. 

“She shoots, she scores. Crowd goes wild for Tiny Toni Topaz.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you remember that. We were still kids.”

“Been thinking about it lately,” he replied, shrugging out of his jacket with her help. “It’s so good we’re not gonna fuck, Toni.”

“Yeah… that was never on the table. You know that, right?”

“I know. It would fuck us up,” he mumbled as he tilted over and awkwardly laid down. “Like me and Jones got fucked up.”

He fell silent while she sat and tugged his boots off, and she figured he’d passed out, but when she got up he spoke again.

“You and Jones are fucked up too, I can tell,” he said, pinning her with dark eyes. “If you and him fucked, it’s okay. I’m not mad at you.”

“Okay, Sweet Pea,” she sighed, looking at him sadly. “Whatever you say.”

“Can’t stay mad at you for anything. Love you, Toni.”

“Yeah, I love you, too.”

“I love you too much to fuck it up like what happened with Jug.” His eyes scrunched shut in a pained expression, exaggerated by how drunk he was.

“I don’t think it was you who fucked that up.”

He shrugged, rolled over, and squeezed his pillow, burrowing into it.

“You gonna remember any of this tomorrow?” Toni asked.

“My dick is off limits, Toni. Cursed by the gods.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“I just want him to come home,” he mumbled softly, already halfway to unconsciousness.

“Go to sleep, Sweet Pea,” she said with a last sad sigh, and headed for the door.

***

The really pathetic thing, Jughead thought, was that he never really did unfuck himself, at least, not all the way. It was the only thing Sweet Pea had asked of him, and he still couldn’t do it. His hopes and dreams lay dead and dying, everywhere he looked. Even his face in the mirror betrayed him; gone was the fresh-faced young man who had once been excited for college and eager to conquer the world. Gone, too, was the only slightly more seasoned college graduate who’d published a novel to great acclaim and thought the world was his bitch, not yet realizing he was neither as tempered nor as savvy as he had believed himself to be. The agents and publishers and, hell, even some of the reviewers always gave great acclaim at first, because more books meant more money, and more money greased everyone’s wheels, and the man who looked back at him no longer shone brightly, or at all, in anyone’s eyes including his own.

He’d managed to secure a small additional advance with a sample of work that he’d yet to follow up on, unable to write his way out of a paper bag. He’d used it to buy a few months with the loan sharks. Jess had come back, for a little while, mostly because an affordable living space was hard to find and she was on the lease, and he owed her that for the shit he’d put her through. They’d been tempted to try to make it work, thinking it would be easier to live together that way, but the center didn’t hold, and things fell apart again rather quickly. Her presence had at least inspired him to keep the apartment clean, but that fell apart again with her departure. And Jughead’s time with the loan sharks was up.

It was when he was confronted with an unsettlingly manipulative one night stand who wanted him -  _ him,  _ as though he was really a big-time author whose work meant  _ anything  _ \- to get her book published, while he stood there in a new mess of empty bottles praying that the ID she’d used to get into the bar to find him was real, that he realized he really had nothing left to lose anymore. She stood there wearing that same S shirt that he’d woken up in the morning he’d found the note, the one he had later remembered Sweet Pea helping him get into once his memory had begun to clear, and thought that he needed to make a change. And that she needed to get the hell out of his shirt, and his apartment.

When Archie called, summoning him to Riverdale, he knew his time had come, almost like it had been predestined, written by some unseen hand (surely not his own; he still wasn’t able to write jack shit.) He would have to see Sweet Pea, he was certain of that. His hand had been forced; he was going home whether he wanted to or not, and Sweet Pea’s ring hung heavy on his finger.

***

The months passed for Sweet Pea in a sort of faded gray time lapse. Not literally, everything was still as obnoxiously brightly colored as ever, but everything  _ felt  _ faded and gray. Every day, he forged himself like a blade, honed sharp like a razor’s edge, all the better to cut with should anyone come too close and see how brittle he was from being left in the cold.

Until, one day, he had suddenly been warm again, smiling easily, floating on the surface of his feelings completely detached from the roiling mess underneath.  _ Fake it ‘til you make it,  _ as he’d heard Keller say annoyingly often. It got people off his ass, and allowed him some semblance of a normal life. He wasn’t happy, but he could participate in his friends being happy, and that was something he’d missed.

It only figured that once Andrews rolled back into town, Jughead wouldn’t be far behind. Sweet Pea should have known, and maybe he was expecting it at least a little. When Jughead had turned up, he’d been able to play it off, bitched at him about the book with Fangs for a minute, and then he’d gotten the hell out before either of them could get into it in front of other people. When Toni called him and told him to come back to close, he figured it was likely Jughead would have been told it was a good time to come back as well. He wasn’t surprised that Jughead wandered in when Toni let herself out, leaving them alone in the bar. He was ready for it, but that didn’t mean he planned to make it easy.

“You shouldn’t be here, Jones,” Sweet Pea growled from behind the bar. “I ought to deck you for what you did.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Jughead replied, looking almost like he wished Sweet Pea would, and the whole though could be done with.

Sweet Pea already knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t even want to. Though violence was something he reveled in at other times, and he had even punched Jughead on more than one occasion prior to the first time they hooked up, he had never hit a lover and he didn’t plan to start now. Truthfully, he’d been careful not to give Jughead more than he could handle those other times, too, seeing as he’d already started to like him then. He wanted to hear him out. He also wanted to throw him out on his ass. He wanted a lot of things, but punching Jughead wasn’t one of them.

“Not today, Jones. I gotta be an idiot for it, but I’ll pass.”

“I can explain. God, please, just let me explain.”

“No one’s stopping you,” Sweet Pea shrugged, hating how quickly he caved to the plaintive tone in Jughead’s voice. 

“I can’t promise you won’t hate me.”

“You got nowhere to go but up.”

“Okay. Okay,” Jughead said, taking a deep breath. “The first thing you need to know is that my life is bullshit.”

“Yeah,” Sweet Pea conceded after a moment’s thought, his mouth curving in a mean smirk that held no kindness in it. “I’ll agree to that.”

“... Okay, I had that coming.”

“Yeah, you really did.”

“After you left that note, I wanted… I must have tried to write to you ten different times. There are so many drafts of letters stuffed in the drawer by my bed. Thought about calling, too. I wanted to reach out so bad.”

“Yeah? So why the hell didn’t you?”

“For one thing? The letter was a stupid idea. I don’t even have your address. For another, your note was very clear, and it made it pretty easy for me to justify wimping out, because the third point here is that I am the worst kind of coward, and I’ve done nothing but let you down.”

“You’re not here because you want to be,” Sweet Pea said. “You’re here because Andrews dragged you back.”

“I’m here in town because of Archie, yeah. I’m here in this bar because of you.”

Jughead made an unconscious motion with his hand, fidgeting with something on his finger, and the movement caught Sweet Pea’s eye. He came far too close to doing a very obvious double take at the glint of metal that resolved immediately into a familiar shape. Something in his heart began to crack open like ice on the Sweetwater River.

“And I’m here because I need a change. I fucked up, Sweet Pea. With you, with everything. When we were younger, I thought there was this particular kind of life I was supposed to want, and anything that didn’t fit that, anything that was too much like my dad-”

“Your dad,” Sweet Pea cut him off, “is a good man. I’d lay down my life for him any day.”

“Yeah,” Jughead smiled regretfully. “Yeah, so would I. I just had to walk a mile in his shoes before I got that, I guess.”

“So what’s so bad about this life you think you’re supposed to want? What, got tired of riding your own gravy train?” Sweet Pea asked. “I know what kind of brain you're carrying around in that giant head of yours. Just got sick of using it, or you didn’t have the Serpents around to make fun of anymore?”

Falling back on the book was a weak defense, and Sweet Pea knew it. He was already warming back up to Jughead, something in him reawakening like flowers in the spring. He was trying like hell to fight it, but Jughead was saying what he needed to hear. If he let him keep going, Sweet Pea was worried Jughead would eventually say something right enough to make him change his mind. He was also dying to hear it, and that was even worse.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about the book. The names were stupid, and to be fair, that wasn’t totally my fault. My publisher had a problem with them and they leveraged me with a clause in my contract and I was put on the spot, and that dumb shit is what came out.”

“What were you going to call me?” Sweet Pea looked at him curiously, though still angry, some of it at himself for being drawn in.

“Periwinkle. My publisher thought it was… you know.” 

Sweet Pea looked like he didn’t know, for a minute, and then the penny dropped.

“You’re kidding. In a book that has an actual gay sex scene-”

“ _ Implied  _ gay sex scene.”

“Yeah, sure. In a book with a gay sex scene so thinly veiled all the people I care about now know I screwed you at the quarry  _ on top of my Serpent jacket, _ your publisher thought a flower name was  _ too gay? _ ”

“Yep. Forced me to change it. Decided what I called Fangs had to go too. I told them the periwinkle is the flower of death but they weren’t having it.”

“Flower of death, huh?” Sweet Pea shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. “I guess that’s badass enough.”

“Look, Sweets, I’m sorry if you think- if you feel like it made you look stupid, or if it embarrassed you, or if it made you think I don’t think well of you,” Jughead said. “That wasn’t what I intended at all. I know that I pushed back against you a lot when I was still a Serpent, and a lot of that made it into the book. You became, or rather he became, the protagonist’s foil in some aspects, not always adversarial, but-”

“Hey, if we were ever adversarial, that was on you.”  _ Good,  _ Sweet Pea thought, this was an argument he could handle.

“Notwithstanding the time you jumped me at Southside right after we met?”

“The time I jumped you at Southside was because you were leaving yourself wide open for the Ghoulies to come after you. You were marked by your own name, Jones. It was either a few bruises from me, or you getting beat by a whole crew who wouldn’t stop until they knocked your teeth in or stuck a knife in your guts. Probably would have sent your stupid fuckin’ hat back to us soaked in your blood.”

Jughead reflexively reached for a beanie that hadn’t been there in seven years, and was almost startled to find it absent. He ran his fingers through his hair instead, but the brief moment he’d just stood there with his hand on his head like he’d forgotten something wasn’t lost on either of them.

He had. He had forgotten a lot.

***

He remembered his first impression of the larger boy, tall, a little bulky and dressed in clothes that only heightened the effect, departing English class with an expletive and zero fucks given for the teacher or anyone else there. How Sweet Pea had seemed to just presume they would be friends, how Jughead had thrown it back at him, and how in the split second before he had looked angry, Sweet Pea had looked hurt and afraid. And maybe,  _ maybe  _ there was something to it when Toni had said  _ he’s just not that into you, _ because Sweet Pea had looked a little like he’d been slapped just then, but that wasn’t all. Jughead remembered the way Sweet Pea’s eyes had looked when he had finally agreed to sit with them: defiant and terrified, wholly unapologetic and yet yearning to be forgiven, and all the while Sweet Pea’s face didn’t so much as twitch, as if he was daring Jughead to say  _ I’m here because he kicked my ass, not the Ghoulies,  _ while his eyes said he would shatter if Jughead did.

As for what Sweet Pea feared, Jughead would come to learn that, too. The boy who would meet any fight head on, seemingly fearless for his own safety, was living every day at that hellhole of a school with the fear that he couldn’t protect one of the Serpent-affiliated kids smaller than he was and therefore under his charge, which was all of them. Jughead was absolutely certain that on the other end of that text that had Sweet Pea so rudely fucking off Ray Bradbury on that first day, there was some little freshman baby Serpent getting slammed against a locker and shaken down, or worse. What Jughead didn’t know was whether that was a task assigned to him or one he had taken on himself because the need existed and it was something he could fix, but it had obviously been that way for a long time; what he did know was that it was a burden that had never been fair to put on Sweet Pea. And Sweet Pea may not have given two fucks about what was fair, but just because he was the size of an adult when he was still a kid, that didn’t mean taking away his childhood was somehow right.

Of course Sweet Pea had been thrown when Jughead had rebuffed him that day. He had essentially been offering Jughead a spot practically in his pocket, always in arm’s reach or a text away, the safest place Jughead could have been in a school that was actually a low-key war zone for which he was in no way prepared. Though Sweet Pea had been fiercely protective of anyone he saw as his responsibility, Jughead would later come to realize the overture of friendship, the open display of something approaching affection, the hopeful note in his voice, were all quite rare.

Jughead wasn’t so screwed up that he would think of a beat-down as a gesture of love, even as surprisingly light of one as Sweet Pea had given him that night. Now though, he saw it for what it had been: Sweet Pea’s first gesture of commitment. Their time in school together had been a dance of Jughead pushing him away and Sweet Pea doubling down, proving he would always be there. Until Jughead pushed too hard, took it too far, and suddenly, he wasn’t.

***

“I know,” he answered finally, realizing he’d been standing there, spaced out with his hand in his hair, and when he pulled it out he winced as Sweet Pea’s ring got tangled briefly.

“I was wrong about a lot of things back then, and I’ve always been bad about knowing who to trust. The people I think I can welcome in turn on me, and the people I think I have to push away… That’s what the book was about, ultimately-”

“This was never about the damn book,” Sweet Pea said. He planted his palms on the bar top and stared down at light gleaming off the whorls in the wood grain. He felt himself crack, split clean through, no defenses left.

“What, then?” Jughead could feel the moment hanging between them, snapping hot like embers from a fire, a tiny spark drifting down and only time could tell if it would catch.

Sweet Pea picked at a nick in the bar top with his thumb, the moment growing longer until he looked up to meet Jughead’s gaze.

“This is about the fact that I loved you,” Sweet Pea said, holding his gaze and then looking back down to that nick in the wood again.

Jughead felt heartsick, punched in the gut, unable to breathe like the wind had been knocked out of him at hearing the words he didn’t know he’d been waiting for in a past tense that turned them sour. In his mind’s eye, he saw Sweet Pea a dozen ways: that first time at Southside, later, arguing with him about how to deal with the Northside, and always, ready to back him in a fight. His initiation, when Sweet Pea had looked at him like he was deciding something, and only landed his punch when Jughead had invited him. In the parking lot at Pop’s that night his old friends abandoned him, at the quarry over the water lapping at their skin, and later, above him, looking down, dark eyes filled with unsaid things. Those same dark eyes above the heads of a crowd at a book reading, looking up to meet him across a coffee shop, in the dark of his room. Looking up at him, kneeling in his shower. Across from him in his bed, looking as lost he had felt.

The same eyes, always; the same look, the same way of seeing him. The same look Sweet Pea had given him when he came into the bar at closing.

The same look Sweet Pea was giving him now.

“I always loved you,” Sweet Pea said again, breath carrying on a resigned sigh. “And I don’t know how to stop.”

Jughead’s heart stuttered in his chest with a rush that nearly dropped him. Sweet Pea had loved him. Sweet Pea  _ still  _ loved him.

_ Sweet Pea loved him. _

He couldn’t fuck it up again.

“I don’t know how to explain to you how everything went wrong, how everything has always been wrong and it’s always made me run from what’s right. That book has made me nothing but unhappy. My life? It sucks. I have nothing and no one who fits me, nowhere I belong, nothing’s ever right,” he said. “Sweet Pea, you’re what’s right. The push and pull between you and I was never fair, because you… You were always by my side. You were the person I could trust the most. The only one who never screwed me over, who always had my back. I knew that before I came here. I just didn’t know how to let myself have that. It would take me a lifetime to find the words to fix this, but they’re the only words I want to write.”

Sweet Pea nodded thoughtfully, like he was having a conversation with himself. And he was; he debated with himself for a moment, but Jughead had finally offered him what he needed, and he knew what he wanted. He looked up at Jughead. 

“A lifetime, huh?” He nodded again. “I think I’ve got one of those.”

It hit Jughead like a truck just then, that he had leaned into Sweet Pea’s pull instead of pushing away, and Sweet Pea had once again doubled down. The taller man turned his back to the bar and hefted himself up, sitting on it, only to haul his legs up and turn on his ass before dropping off the front. 

“Don’t tell Toni. She hates it,” he said.

“I won’t.”

Long fingers twined with his.

“Come home with me.”

“Sweets, I… I’m not just gonna be okay overnight,” Jughead stammered. “I’m pretty much a functional alcoholic at this point. I became everything about my father that I hated.”

“Your dad got through it, and he’s a good man.”  _ You’re a good man, somewhere in there,  _ Sweet Pea thought, but did not say. 

“Sweet Pea,” Jughead said softly, like he’d heard it anyway.

Sweet Pea cupped his jaw, leaned in, and sealed their lips together in a kiss. Jughead’s eyes fell closed, and stayed that way for a moment before he opened them again and gazed at Sweet Pea as though seeing him for the first time.

“Come  _ home  _ with me,” Sweet Pea said again, and Jughead could only nod.

***

It didn’t come as a surprise to Jughead that Sweet Pea had at some point acquired another trailer in the years since the fall of Sunnyside trailer park. It was how Sweet Pea preferred to live, a house both unattainable and an unwise commitment in the now fragile town, an apartment building too crowded with humanity for Sweet Pea’s liking. Nor was he alone in his desire for a just-right balance of solitude and neighborly interaction, and as such, Sunnyside was not the sole and only trailer park to have ever graced Riverdale.

The trailer was on the smaller side, not even as big as the shoebox Jughead had shared with his dad all those years ago and somewhat more in line with an ability to actually be properly mobile, though as was often the case he couldn’t be sure it still was. It was the recreational sort of trailer, though on the larger end for one of those, that he wasn’t even certain was legally habitable full time, not that such a technicality would stop Sweet Pea. Jughead wasn’t one to judge: he had lived in legal residence on a couch in his dad’s one bedroom trailer home, and illegally in a movie theater, a doomsday bunker, and squatting in an abandoned house. He was in fact, at present, living in the doomsday bunker  _ again. _

He didn’t get much of a chance to appreciate the interior as he was thrust through the open door and crowded against the cabinetry opposite as soon as the door banged shut behind them. Sweet Pea’s hands were everywhere, running up under Jughead’s shirt to slide over his belly and chest as Sweet Pea pressed flush to his back and sucked burning kisses into his neck. Sweet Pea rolled his hips, rutting the long, hard line of his cock firmly against Jughead’s ass with a heady groan echoing from both of them as his hand slipped lower and rubbed over Jughead’s dick through his clothes.

Jughead squirmed around in Sweet Pea’s grip to face him, cupping his face in his hands and kissing him deeply, short, breathy moans getting lost in the soft, wet sounds of lips and tongue moving together. Sweet Pea broke the kiss and rested his forehead against Jughead’s, soft breaths falling hot on Jughead’s lips. 

“Bed?” Jughead asked, and Sweet Pea closed his eyes and nodded. 

Kissing Jughead again, he urged them through the cramped trailer toward the small sectioned off bed area at the end, shedding clothes as they went. By the time they hit the bed, Sweet Pea was stripping out of his t-shirt, leaving only his boxer-briefs, and Jughead was down to his boxers and sleeveless undershirt. Pushing Jughead onto the unmade bed and kneeling on it after him, Sweet Pea seized the hem of the undershirt and pulled it up and off. 

He had long been familiar with Jughead’s second Serpent tattoo, but they’d both acquired more ink in the intervening years since the quarry. Jughead had had a little bit more that night after the book reading, and a lot more in the shower months ago. Sweet Pea had always known he’d get more, seeing as one didn’t get a neck tattoo for subtlety, but he couldn’t say he wasn’t a little surprised by how much Jughead had gotten over the years. It all looked about the same as it had in the shower though, which wasn’t a surprise given how broke Jughead had been at the time.

Sweet Pea leaned in, dropping teasing kisses against Jughead’s lips as he trailed a hand down his chest, over his soft belly, to finally stroke the length that tented Jughead’s boxers. The smaller man gasped against his lips, bucking hard into his hand, a damp spot soaking into the fabric. Sweet Pea pulled back, tugging at the waistband, only for Jughead to yank the boxers down, kick them off, and throw them, his blood-flushed cock slapping against his belly in the flurry of motion, the red-tinted head shiny with moisture. It looked almost painfully hard, Jughead breathing heavily as it gave a hard twitch under Sweet Pea’s gaze, a dribble of precome leaking from the tip.

Sweet Pea groaned low in his throat as his own cock gave an answering throb that had him stripping out of his boxer briefs and straddling Jughead, spitting lewdly into his hand, gripping them and stroking them together. Jughead tensed and moaned as Sweet Pea slid his palm up and worked it over the tip of each of them in turn, slicking them with liquid arousal on the downstroke.

It would have been romantic to say he could have stayed like that all night, poetic, even, as Jughead cried beautiful little broken moans into his mouth against the sweet-slick sounds of their kissing, their hips hitching and breath shaking as their bodies rocked together on the bed. It  _ would  _ have been, if watching Jughead ride that razor’s edge of ecstasy beneath him didn’t have him hard enough to pound nails and growing desperate with it, desperate with a desire to open Jughead up on his fingers and sink his cock into him slow, to  _ watch  _ Jughead’s asshole take him inch by inch because  _ seeing was believing  _ and maybe then he’d finally feel like this could be real. The thought had him pulling away and reaching for the lube tossed carelessly in the drawer under the bed.

Jughead gave a startled cry as Sweet Pea rolled him over and gripped his hips, pulling him to his knees with his ass in the air, a crimson blush spreading across his face at being manhandled, which he liked, and though feeling exposed sent a shock of embarrassment through him, he allowed it, because he kinda liked that, too. He pulled a pillow into his arms and buried his face in it, sighing happily when it smelled like Sweet Pea.

Behind him, Sweet Pea froze, staring down at his lower back, mouth hanging open in shock.

“What the fuck,” he said, his tone wondering as his fingers traced the ink at the base of Jughead’s spine. This one definitely hadn’t been there before.

Jughead’s eyes flew open as he remembered what was back there; it wasn’t exactly in a place where he saw it every day, and he’d been too caught up in the moment to think about it.

“Oh god,” he moaned weakly into the pillow, closing his eyes again as a heady thrill of shame lanced through his groin, making him throb.

The tattoo, about the size of a hand laid flat, was of a cluster of flowers trailing a stem, pink petals with curves and folds inked in vivid detail. It was healed, but the colors were bright, the edges crisp, and Sweet Pea was sure it hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen Jughead. His fingers trembled as he stroked the design, reverent and awestruck. His heart was clamoring in his chest, beating out a proclamation that this was it, Jughead was his and had voluntarily marked himself so. His mind, super unhelpfully, kept supplying obscene terms for the  _ placement  _ of that kind of tattoo, as well as suggestions about what he should do with that knowledge that had him gripping the base of his dick and biting his lip as he came a little too close to going over the edge right there.

He found himself gripping tighter when Jughead gave a long whine at his touch.

“Sweet Pea,  _ please, _ ” he begged, and Sweet Pea needed it as bad as he did, so he obliged, slicking his fingers and rubbing Jughead’s opening gently until it relaxed enough for him to slip a finger inside.

“Fuck, you’re tight,” he moaned, sliding the tip of his finger along the curve of the ring of muscle before pressing deeper.

“Haven’t been with any guys since the last time I was with you,” Jughead replied, moaning as Sweet Pea loosened him little by little.

“God, that’s hot. You’re tight like you were the first time,” Sweet Pea leaned over him, murmuring in his ear, “at the quarry. Had to spend so much time working you open so I could take you, right there on the ground, on top of my leathers.”

Jughead gasped, the memory landing in a visceral space like a punch to the gut, crying out and twisting on Sweet Pea’s fingers when he slid a second in beside the first. 

“You’re like this every time for me, so gorgeous, the way you want me, and so hot inside that I go crazy with wanting to be in you.”

A shuddering groan wracked Jughead’s body as Sweet Pea’s fingertips pressed in just the right spot inside of him. He was only ever like this for Sweet Pea; with women, he stayed present, taking charge of their pleasure and his, and with the handful of men there had been in college, he’d never fully let go either. It had always been different with Sweet Pea. It wasn’t a dominance thing, but more the case that he let himself be carried away, knowing that his pleasure was Sweet Pea’s too, and that all he had to do was be there, and be  _ him. _

Sweet Pea moved back down Jughead’s body, giving the tattoo another long, considering look, then he pressed his tongue just above Jughead’s tailbone and licked upward, lapping over the ink. Jughead whined again, clenching hard around Sweet Pea’s fingers. Sweet Pea waited for him to relax again, then kept stretching him, wringing soft cries from him as he worked him open, adding a third finger and continuing until it was time.

His dick was iron-hard and aching as he slicked it generously with lube, trying not to give himself too much friction too soon; Jughead would give him that soon enough. Even with the preparation, Jughead was wonderfully out of practice, and it was going to be a tight fit. He shifted forward and rubbed himself over Jughead’s beautifully worked open hole, then pressed in, the wide head of his cock stretching Jughead around him as it pushed past the ring of muscle. Sweet Pea groaned and breathed deeply and slow; Jughead dropped his chest to the mattress, dipping his back and tilting his ass up, making Sweet Pea lean forward over him, holding himself steady on Jughead’s hips as his thick shaft sank deeper inside. They both groaned, and Sweet Pea rolled his hips, pulling back a bit before sinking in a little further than before, slowly and rhythmically fucking deeper into Jughead’s ass until he bottomed out.

Jughead was gasping into the pillow, his face and chest flushed red as Sweet Pea filled him. It stung a bit, but felt so good even through the initial discomfort. He could feel Sweet Pea, massive inside him, like a heavy lead weight pressing down into his belly as the larger man shifted forward and stretched out over his back, arms bracing on either side of him as lips found his shoulder. Jughead widened his knees slightly to distribute the weight. Sweet Pea wrapped an arm around him, shifting his hips, and Jughead gasped at the movement inside him, eyes falling closed on a ragged moan as the subtle shifts of Sweet Pea’s cock buried in his insides gave way to slow, rolling thrusts that emptied and filled him over and over again.

Sweet Pea’s breaths fell heavy at his shoulder, at his neck as Sweet Pea mouthed at his skin, the rumble of a groan starting low in his chest against Jughead’s back. Pinned to the mattress by his warm, solid weight, Jughead felt helpless and safe in the best way possible, protected and shielded from the rest of the hopeless, horrible world while being worked closer and closer to the precipice of his release by Sweet Pea’s strong, unerringly pleasurable thrusts that slid across his prostate with blissful regularity. He didn’t have to worry about feeling sad and washed-up as an author or wonder where his next meal would come from or deal with being twenty-five and feeling like he’d already peaked and there was nothing left for him, not with Sweet Pea’s cock driving into him and leaving no room for rational thought; the only peak he had to worry about was the orgasm about to crash over him.

The hand on his chest snaked lower to grip his dick where it hung hard and heavy between his thighs and leaking profusely. The sudden, sure stroke of Sweet Pea’s hand had Jughead gasping as his balls drew tight and the tension in his gut coiled with imminent release, but before it could break, Sweet Pea fucked into him hard with a few rough, desperate thrusts that buried him deep, punctuated with short, soft grunts that broke into a low groan, and came. Jughead could feel it, the way Sweet Pea pulsed inside him, and it tipped him over the edge, spilling over Sweet Pea’s hand with a strangled cry. Sweet Pea tensed again as Jughead clenched around him, moaning softly into Jughead’s shoulder.

They fell to the side, Jughead pulled along by Sweet Pea’s arm wrapping around his chest, spooned tightly with Sweet Pea still in him, shifting a little with tiny not-quite-thrusts, not yet gone soft. Jughead’s breaths came rapidly, his heart pounding before slowing down. Sweet Pea, behind him, was just as winded, finally nuzzling against Jughead’s neck with a warm sigh of satisfaction as he wiped come off his hand on Jughead’s stomach and settled it over his heart.

“All I need, right here,” he murmured lazily, feeling Jughead’s heartbeat under his palm.

Jughead’s chest hitched with a swell of emotion, and though he tried to calm it, he felt his face getting wet, hot tears trailing over skin that burned with embarrassment. Sweet Pea’s words were like a blessing, a benediction he didn’t deserve. Sweet Pea’s arms tightened around him.

“What are you all up in your head about now?” Sweet Pea’s tone was soft, and Jughead looked over his shoulder to find Sweet Pea’s dark eyes watching him intently.

He shouldn’t be forgiven this easily; it felt like taking advantage, stealing something he didn’t earn. He said as much to Sweet Pea, his words tumbling out in a frantic rush.

“I’ve never been able to choose whether or not I love you,” Sweet Pea said after a thoughtful silence, “but I can choose whether or not I  _ want  _ to love you. And I do. Want to. All you have to do is let me, and not be a dick about it.”

Jughead’s face scrunched up as he nodded, his throat choked with emotion. His hand found Sweet Pea’s on his chest, and he lifted it to his mouth, pressing his lips to Sweet Pea’s knuckles in a kiss that he hoped conveyed how much he wanted this.

Sweet Pea used his thumb to swipe away Jughead’s tears.

“I dunno how to tell you this,” he murmured, “but those fingers were up your butt.”

Jughead tried to hold in the laugh, but he couldn’t, and the tension poured out of him as he shook with it.

“You asshole,” he muttered without heat as he felt Sweet Pea laughing silently with him. 

Sweet Pea’s hand strayed downward, fingertips ghosting idly over Jughead’s belly. It tickled, making Jughead tense up, and he sucked in a breath as he tightened around Sweet Pea, still inside him. Sweet Pea grunted against his shoulder.

“Jesus, Sweets. How are you still hard?” Jughead asked wonderingly. 

“I dunno.” Sweet Pea shrugged, kissing his shoulder. “Kinda felt good, then you had a moment or whatever and it seemed like a bad time to pull out, so I just… didn’t.”

Jughead didn’t have a response for that, but it was a fair point, and he could feel his body beginning to take interest again. “So… do you want to…”

“Mhm,” Sweet Pea mumbled against his skin, shifting his hips to press deeper, his hand drifting lower to stroke Jughead’s already swelling cock.

“Just like this,” Jughead whispered, feeling Sweet Pea nod into his shoulder and shift inside him, his movements rhythmic and slow. They kept that pace until they both finished a second time, shaking apart together. They held each other, after, Jughead’s head resting on Sweet Pea’s shoulder, Sweet Pea’s arm draped around him, both of them languid and fucked out. After a while, Sweet Pea’s voice broke the silence.

“Jug.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know my flower sorta looks like a pussy when you paid someone to tattoo it on you?”

Jughead snorted a laugh. “I think you know I didn’t. Asshole.”

“You piss them off or something? They really leaned into it.”

“... No comment,” Jughead said, a smile breaking through only to falter. “There are still loan sharks. They’ll come after me again.”

“Let ‘em try. They’ll wish they hadn’t.” Sweet Pea held him closer. “Where’re you staying?”

“Eh. The bunker. Again.” 

“Sucks.”

“Been thinking about hitting up Archie.”

“You kidding me?” Sweet Pea grumbled. “Place was crawling with jingle jangle. Red’s probably getting high off the wallpaper. Stay here.”

Jughead looked at him, startled. Sweet Pea absently tapped the ring on Jughead’s finger, then laced their fingers together.

“You should stay,” Sweet Pea repeated. 

“... Alright.”

“I think it’s gonna rain,” Sweet Pea said, breaking the tension.

Jughead listened as the patter of raindrops hit the trailer roof. He didn’t know when it had started.

“It is raining,” he replied.

“Yeah.”

Sweet Pea’s mouth curled into a small smile, and he let out a soft laugh. He pressed a kiss to Jughead’s hair and stayed there, and the rain lulled them both to sleep.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is finished! 
> 
> Step 1: smorgasbord of angst.  
> Step 2: fix it with bang.  
> Step 3: please leave kudos/comments if you enjoyed this, I know I have enjoyed writing it and sharing it with you! 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Special thanks to Viknikisbae for extremely appreciated words of encouragement and endless enthusiasm! =)

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave kudos/comments if you enjoy this story! I love to hear from you! 
> 
> I honestly don’t love writing in the middle of a current season for a lot of reasons, but this plot idea was burning a hole in my pocket and I decided to run with it before canon comes along and fucks it. So basically this will probably have expired by the time I get the second chapter up. Oh, well.


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